Complete: One Dimension

In the month of August, I designed, developed, and deployed onedimension.net. For the last month I’ve been using it nearly daily.

I figured that rather than just making the site and moving on to the next thing, I’d actually use the system. This is a bit different than what I’ve done before primarily because this is the first site I’ve developed that I designed because I needed something like it.

One dimension is a bit of a combination of a note-taking system and a weblog. It exists as a folder of markdown files on my computer, and gets transformed into a rich link-based series of html pages when built. In this way, it’s not really a blog. There aren’t “posts” with an index page that lists them all out. Everything on One Dimension is a thought, which get linked to other thoughts through bi-directional links. The only way to navigate is to move from one thought to another though the forward or backlinks. I’ve been finding this way of writing is really valuable; it’s about forming a thought but equally about creating connections to existing thoughts.

Now that I have this baseline system, there’s tons to improve on, like additional ways of navigating and a better interface to edit. It’ll all emerge naturally I’m sure.

I feel like I’ve said this a lot though this project, but this site was a change of pace for me. It’s pretty different; it’s something I’ve committed to using and sticking with over time. So in that sense, it feels like the first website I’ve built as part of Twelve Websites that is a more holistic success. I’ve learned a ton from building previous sites, but now I get to learn a lot more by using one I’ve made over a longer period of time.