Why have both a wiki and a blog?

A lot of the information I've been posting on my blog has been useful as reference material; it's as helpful a year later as it is the day it's written.

However, the blog format does not lend itself well to organizing such reference information and making it available. A blog is organized chronologically, which shows when the information was documented and shows how the documentation evolves. But it makes it difficult to find all postings on a particular topic, and to browse through all postings on that topic. It makes revisions difficult, in part because a blog is supposed to be something of a historical record, and in part because the format focuses readers on the latest postings at the expense of earlier postings. When an old posting on a topic is updated with a new posting, the new one can point to the old one but the old one cannot easily post to the new one. A reader who finds the old one has no idea there's a newer one with additional information.

A wiki organizes information around topics instead of chronologically. (See Why Wikis are Valuable.) It doesn't show as easily when information was documented or in what order, but it does show what information is related and make it easy to browse. Wiki pages can be more easily updated with newer information, so that as readers find information in the wiki, they can be confident that it's the latest the author has made available.

Many/most wikis are collaborative efforts of many people gathering together the information they know, whereas blogs are usually written by a solitary author. This wiki is written by a solitary author--me--so in that respect, it's more like a blog that is designed to be browsed easily. Why use a wiki instead of standard static HTML pages? A wiki is an easy way for developerWorks to make web space available to me that I can easily edit, rather than allowing me to upload HTML files.

So, this is an experiment. The experiment is to see if the information I'm documenting can more easily be organized as a wiki than as a blog. The wiki format should make it easier for me to publish and for you to consume. The information will be the same, but the format should be better. Let's see how it goes.