Discontinuing PieCrust and Wikked

There haven’t been any blog posts about some of my open-source projects in a while and the reason for this is two-fold. First, I’ve been lazy about that side of my hobbies while I’ve been re-allocating my free time to writing and illustrating roleplaying game books. Second, I’ve actually discontinued a couple of my main projects: PieCrust and Wikked.

Discontinuing PieCrust

PieCrust was a static website generator that used to run this very website. It had been running it for a good 12 years! But maybe you’ve heard the joke: blogs that are powered by static generators only ever have a handful of posts a year, and those posts are only about static generators.

It was a bit less true in my case because PieCrust had a microblog endpoint that let me post things on the go from my phone, but it was still somewhat true. And that bothered me. Plus, the problem was that, half of the time, writing a new post would send me down a rabbit hole of new feature development, improvements, bug fixing, dependency updates, and more. I don’t have time for that stuff anymore and, more importantly, I don’t have as many shits to give anymore anyway. So I figured I would move to something that someone else is maintaining. But after a brief time using Hugo, I just said “fuck it” and migrated everything to good ol’ WordPress.

It’s a bit ironic because, before developing PieCrust, this website was actually running on WordPress. I didn’t have anything against WordPress back then… I just wanted to be more nerdy about it 😅 I think it worked. Anyway, WordPress just works, it’s well supported, can be made to run fast, and I have more time for other hobbies while also writing more here.

I’d like to thank the several people who helped or sent feedback about PieCrust along all those years. It was a pleasure to see it used here and there by others!

Discontinuing Wikked

Wikked was something I built to write all my notes into, about 10 years ago. There were a few good note-taking tools back then, but I wanted some very specific requirements met:

1. Everything stored in plain text files. I didn’t want some opaque cloud storage or proprietary database thing or whatever.
2. Easy support for inter-notes links.
3. Ability to specify some kind of properties on the notes, and query them. For instance, tag some notes with “Recipe”, and have a page that lists all my recipes in one big list that’s automatically up-to-date if I add a new recipe.
4. Access to my notes everywhere, especially on the go.

Back then I couldn’t find anything like that so I built it. I fulfilled requirement 4 by turning the whole thing into a wiki engine that can be access on the web.

Things changed four years ago when a couple of web devs released Obsidian. I discovered it only a couple years ago. Obsidian fulfills most of the requirements I listed, and does it way better, more elegantly, and more efficiently than Wikked. The first two requirements are also part of Obsidian’s core principles, but wrapped inside a nice looking editor. You can install the DataView plug-in for the 3rd requirement, and there are mobile applications for the 4th requirement. Paying for Obsidian Sync makes things even smoother on that front, and I highly recommend it.

So there, I converted all my notes to Obsidian (which consisted in… copying the files over, since both Wikked and Obsidian use plain-text Markdown files! That’s the whole point!) I haven’t looked back since.

I don’t think anybody really used Wikked out there, so I don’t think anybody will be affected… but if they are, simply copy your files over to Obsidian like me! And thank you for trying Wikked!

Of course I’m not done with open source development, but I have definitely reduced the time I allocate to it, in favour of other hobbies and personal projects. Have fun!