Follow-up on 2024-08-14_23-33
I’m not sure if this is a good idea, but maybe I should hide the front page of my Zettelkasten? It would give me a way to discover random ideas.
On the other hand, I’m trying to make it more journal-like, so this idea would not help with that.
I’m introducing a new “Thought” tag, which will be used as entry points for the current threads I’m thinking about and developing.
The idea is to have an initial post tagged with “Thought” and follow-up notes are linked to that as a new reply. Over time, I’ll end up with a conclusion that can be developed into one or more permanent notes (2.6.9.5.1 and 2.6.11).
This is a remixed version of the #Folgezettel and 2.6.4 A strukturált jegyzetek a Zettelkasten belépőpontjai.
Follow-up on 2024-09-06_23-25
I want to find more ideas about using blogs as an external mind. Digital gardening is one way of doing this. 2.6.10
But I’m more interested in the commonplace book, where ideas are just thrown into a journal and, over time, developed into more refined ideas. I don’t care about nurturing the same post over the years.
My problem with that idea 2.6.10 is that I don’t know what the end result will look like. Instead of working on something for a long time, we should focus on outputting more posts and refining each new one better than the previous one.
This method was first mentioned in 2024-08-18_08-52 Writing Inbox in iA Writer.
These are my highlights from reading The Memex Method—Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow.
The blog as an annotated browser-history
Is blogging like adding annotations to browser history? If you mainly blog about things you found online, sure…
Every day, I load my giant folder of tabs; zip through my giant collection of RSS feeds; and answer my social telephones – primarily emails and Twitter mentions – and I open each promising fragment in its own tab to read and think about.
If the fragment seems significant, I’ll blog it: I’ll set out the context for why I think this seems important and then describe what it adds to the picture.
So, his primary source is his web browsing. That’s fine.
My primary blogging sources also include my ideas. Maybe that’s why having a Zettelkasten is important at the end. Perhaps I should also keep a tab open for my ideas? I love the idea of fragments being opened in tabs. This is a nice metaphor since macOS tabs exist in the UI everywhere, so they provide a simple UI for fragments of information in apps that are made for browsing and managing information.
In the (my) blogging method, the writer blogs about everything that seems interesting, until a subject gels out of all of those disparate, short pieces.
So, blogging on its own can be a Zettelkasten-like way of emerging ideas as we develop them. Why do I need my Zettelkasten, then? Maybe my blog is my Zettelkasten. I think a Zettelkasten can help thread ideas together in an outline format, forcing ideas to emerge.
Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research – it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books and essays and stories and speeches will be about.
Blogging is a way of discovery, so blogging about something should be like date-ordered public thinking. Tags are subjects of interest. Maybe I should have more specific tags, like “Mac app renaissance.”
To conclude, my Zettelkasten is one of the backbones of my blog, along with journaling and browsing the web.
Follow-up on 2024-09-01_12-48
Looks like having the comma after the wikilink in follow-up notes will break the backlinks feature (relevant code).
For now, I’m going to use the following format:
Follow-up on wikilink
Follow-up on 2024-08-14_23-33
I forgot that I have a “Follow-up” button on my Zettelkasten website. This can be used for quickly writing a follow-up note about something I already started. Basically yet another way to create threads.
Then, I could save these threads by opening them on the website one-by-one and saving the stacked note URL.
Inbox workflow from Ploum:
I simply have an “inbox” folder where there are drafts in gemtext format. They could linger there for months or years. Sometimes, they are published one hour after starting them. There’s no rule.
I’ve been greatly influenced by Cory Doctorow and his memex method. In my inbox, I keep a “today.gmi” file in which I write small reflections and links to interesting articles. When the file is bigger than 1000 words, I try to give it a direction, I reorder the nuggets and publish it without thinking too much about it.
As a consequence, my blog is a mix of focused posts that took a long time to write, focused posts that were written in a whim and posts containing random thoughts and links. I let you try to guess in which category is a given post.
I like the ideas of this post. Having an inbox where my posts are drafted, then publish them directly. I should have a better system for using iA Writer in my everyday blogging, not just longer posts and the Zettelkasten-type notes.
I basically have a Bike outline named “Decoding”, which is used as daily notes and I can publish things directly from there. iA Writer is more for post drafts, or general ideas. I should maybe use it to draft stuff there. If something emerges, then maybe create a project for it in my Writings folder.
So this is the order of my idea flow:
I should just have one place, which is the #Drafting tag to use it as a writing inbox.
I really like how Andy Matuschak 2024-08-19_16-24-andy-matuschak uses the writing inbox concept. It is a list of ideas which should be worked on, then formed into something final.
I should have some form of flow with any material which is enters my life somehow, I work on it, shape it, then I have a final artifact 2.8.4 which can be used as a product that I’m sharing with someone (or me).
So when I’m working on something, I should ask that how this will be finalized?
Follow-up on 2024-08-14_23-41 Using Drafts to write notes
Sadly linking in #Drafts doesn’t work like that. If I want to use my follow-up script in #Drafts, then I have to assign a timestamp as the title then it can be used as a link.
h1 element.
Actually I should start my #Zettelkasten notes in #Drafts. When I have multiple ideas, it is easier to capture them in that app.
I can also pre-link these notes together in Drafts in the same as I can in iA Writer, so when I export them, the links should still work.
I’m thinking about giving up the general idea of the #Zettelkasten. I don’t have time to create permanent notes (or whatever we call them) and then link them together if I don’t use any of these notes in a writing project. And I don’t have any writing projects.
Instead, I want to focus more on using my #Zettelkasten as a journal-like medium where I can think freely in public and don’t have restrictions on how I format notes or link them.
This change means I would have more random thoughts like this, and if something is a returning thought, then maybe I’ll convert it into a more refined idea that can be stored in my outline.
On the other hand, if I read about an interesting topic, I would still use this page to store classic Zettelkasten notes (2.6.11).
Managing folgezettels means that I should have a general idea about why I’m collecting notes about a topic. Since a #Folgezettel is a thread, it should have some form of outcome. I can grab them as-is and finalize them into a blogpost or a project, or some form of plan.
When I see a #Folgezettel emerging, I could pick a bunch of notes and paste their content into #Gibberish. This way, I can create the first draft using a chat-like UI and get a feel for the final post.
Source: Making my file archive portable in a different way – Decoding
I concluded that each of these tools has its place.
I have a bunch of apps where I can manage information, and I should cut them back and figure out which one I’m using for what.
Here’s an initial list of my current use case of them.
Follow-up: 2024-02-21_00-19-conclusion-on-my-journaltype-apps
I’m a designer and front–end developer. I enjoy crafting quality macOS applications on the side. I’m also passionate about industrial design, typography, architecture, and art.
He makes an app called Finbar, which I use for searching my menubar from the keyboard.
Planning out my time with iCal calendars and groups, and being able to click back and forth between that planning view and David Allen’s “hard landscape,” is very appealing. I’d forgotten your earlier post on this topic, but I’ll be returning to it for ideas.
The printed calendar I carry with me doesn’t have the kind of detail yours does, but it does have the advantage of giving me four months of schedule in my back pocket. Do you print your calendars to any special size—e.g., for pasting into a Moleskine—or just to letter-sized?
The daily agenda for a trip sounds like a great idea for many (salesmen, in particular), but my trips are almost always focused on a single project. I’m more likely to be juggling appointments on the days I am in front of my computer.
Thanks for mentioning iCal. I have ditched eveything else and find that iCal has everything I need for GTD.
It’s a calendar, to-do (to-do’s can be sorted by calendar, too, by the way) list, tickler file (just put “See File under “file name” in the notes field) and, well, everything else that GTD requires.
Here’s the reason I forced iCal to work for me: I don’t carry a PDA, just a sony ericsson phone, and everything that is in iCal, including tasks and alarms, are synced with my phone quickly via iSync. I even have a script to open iSync, sync them, them quit iSync, all by hitting Shift-F8. So I just tap the hotkey when I get to my mac and leave it, and all my stuff is current all the time and very portable, always in my pocket.
Another great thing, it doesn’t just import from iCal to the phone, it syncs them, so when I’m out and I need to add a task, I can do it shorthand on the phone and it will sync to a calendar called “Inbox” in iCal when I sync up.
I would love to use fother fun GTD software, but alas, I don’t need to. If you carry a syncable phone with you everywhere, I highly recommend tweaking iCal to work as your GTD system.
Did I mention there’s tons of little apps and even widgets that let you see your iCal stuff at a glance without bringing up iCal? Very nice.
#TBD…
I was think about switching from #Things to #TaskPaper. Task-management is the last piece where I still don’t use plain text, albeit using Markdown in Things notes (see 2023-12-09_12-09 Things to-do journaling template).
TMTask table includes projects, headers, and to-dos.hook files linking back to projects as way to have a fake Spotlight index.
Knowing that the database is fairly easy to understand, I’m a bit more confident that I can export my to-dos out of Things. I can even use the SQLite database directly as an archival format too.
The non-existence of end-to-end encryption is still bugs me though.
I’m an experienced software engineer living in Magdeburg, Germany. Available for projects that match (
Swift()/[Objective C]).
Programmers complain about distractions all the time. But when we journal and document our actions, we can drop them in the moment and pick them up later from where we left off. It’s like bookmarks for our lives (see next actions 2.7).
We will also have a history of our actions in the journal, which can be used as a reference when we have to go back in time.
Automations should be exported into Git repositories. They have to be installed since most automation tool expects a script, a shortcut, or a macro to be imported into a library, or installed in a special place, but we can still export and assemble files from our tools into a repositories.
Keeping these repositories up-to-date can be a burden, since we have to manually export files. But it’s still beneficial to keep these under version control, since sync problems can happen, so we can go back to a previous version more easily.
When committing atomic changes of a “thing”, it has to have the following items included:
If the commit includes these, we can directly commit it into the main branch.
However, this wouldn’t work in a team setting since it requires too much discipline from other people. Also committing directly to the main branch can be dangerous.
This is my standard notes template for journaling about a #Things to-do in its notes.
# 2023-12-09_12-07
Notes about what happened with the to-do…
# 2023-12-09_12-09
Yet more notes about what happened with the to-do…
Source: Hook: getting out of the Dock - Discussion & Help - Hookmark Forum
To display the icon on the Dock:
defaults write com.cogsciapps.hook background.app.mode 0
To revert it to be a background only app:
defaults write com.cogsciapps.hook background.app.mode 0
I’m going to keep my interstitial journal separate from my Zettelkasten. My journal doesn’t need Git and all the bells and whistles of my Zettelkasten. I just want to have a simple place to quickly draft ideas.
Some notes may move over to my Zettelkasten, which I can automate, but it’s very private, so I don’t want to accidentally publish something.
People seemingly like Arc because of its tab management. I think it can be replicated with Safari as well using tab groups.
Arc doesn’t even have bookmarks, but Safari does.
I should manage my Pull Requests like this, since they are very important.
I can quickly search today’s notes by typing fdate into The Archive’s omni bar. Typinator will expand today’s date.
I also modified my Open Current Note in Zettelkasten shortcut to give me an option to open the note in The Archive too. I just figured out that it searches for the note and gives me backlinks.
Follow-up on 2023-12-02_16-34:
I should stop adding URL slugs to my Zettelkasten notes. It’s just adds noise when I’m linking notes with long titles, like this one → 2023-12-08_15-54-increase-your-productivity-on-personal-projects
I could actually support pipes in links, so I wouldn’t see the long URL slug. → 2023-10-17_00-21
Simon Willison is the creator of Datasette, an open source tool for exploring and publishing data. He currently works full-time building open source tools for data journalism, built around Datasette and SQLite.
Prior to becoming an independent open source developer, Simon was an engineering director at Eventbrite. Simon joined Eventbrite through their acquisition of Lanyrd, a Y Combinator funded company he co-founded in 2010.
He is a co-creator of the Django Web Framework, and has been blogging about web development and programming since 2002 at simonwillison.net
automation-things-journalJournal About Things To-Do
date, published, things_url, title attributes in the frontmattertitle → name of the selected Things itemdate → the current datepublished → falsethings_url → URL of the selected Things itemOpen Things To-Do Journal
thearchive://match/TERM works like the search but displays a good match directly; this is similar to Wiki-Links. You likely want to use this.thearchive://search/TERM searches for TERM as if you typed it inI created the new repository for my first automation script. https://github.com/zsbenke/automation-taskpaper-checklists
It would serve as a demo.
Since I want to use TaskPaper as just another editor app, I should move my interstitial journal file out of it.
I cancelled some parts of this project. → 2023-12-09_10-04
I think I’m going to give up my TaskPaper journal. I just think The Archive app makes so much sense as a journal and Zettelkasten.
I can develop notes and journal about stuff here. It’s even have images integration, and I can use the old style Notational Velocity app.
The following diagram explains the flow of my #Zettelkasten content pipeline.
I indexed my #Zettelkasten notes in DEVONthink and also turned on syncing without uploading indexed items. On other devices, I also want to have this database synced, but I should also set it up the same way as on the original laptop.
I want to use DEVONthink to browse my Zettelkasten locally. It can even get and parse hashtags. But I can’t use hypens in the name of the hashtag for the Hungarian suffixes.
There is a way to open a different archive when starting The Archive app from the Terminal.
$ open -n /Applications/The\ Archive.app --args -archiveURL "file:///Users/YOURUSER/path/to/notes/"
For example, I can open my Running Lists folder with this command.
$ open -n /Applications/The\ Archive.app --args -archiveURL "file:///Users/zsbenke/Documents/Running%20Lists/"
This will open a new instance of The Archive app. I’m not sure if that’s intended behavior, but it works for quick checks.
I started adding slugs to the fleeting notes category. Since I use my Zettelkasten in The Archive app, I want to see the high-level title there.