Notetaking Workflow
Note Organization & Categorization
Apparently inter-note links break if there are spaces & special characters in the filename. Rather than trying to find a compatible solution, I think it’s probably easier to cement a naming convention.
My original plan was to name all notes in lowercase with dashes instead of spaces, but I feel like that may be a headache later on to try and keep up with inter-note links if I ever change a filename.
If I end up sticking to this whole notetaking business, I can imagine that duplicate filenames may also become problematic at some point.
The process of creating a note title or filename must not be a bottleneck in my thought train. 🚂
Filenames with Zettelkasten ID
Theoretically this should take care of all issues that may occur with filename changes & inter-note linking. The main downside to this is that I’d end up with a huge collection of notes with arbitrary strings as titles.
Problem: I would need to devise (or find) a way to implement an easy-to-use method of fuzzy searching my files. My static site already implements this to some degree; however, fuzzy search would also need to be supported by every notetaking application I use.
Makeshift solutions do not mix well with my thought process. If I ever have a problem with an implementation, the problem will nag at me until I scrap the entire project (worst case scenario).
TODO: Create a naming convention for notes
Single Taxonomy
Categorization is hard. It may be best to organize all my notes start out by organizing all my notes in a single content folder, and to use a single taxonomy (e.g. tags) until I can optimize the structure. It is easier to pull a single tag out of a list than to go into all of my files and add taxonomy elements later.
Problem: A single content folder with a lot of notes might become difficult to manage as the number of notes increases.
Multiple Taxonomies
Perhaps it might be best to split notes into three sections: TIL, bookmarks, and longform notes.
This might actually be the best idea.
- Bookmarks / Software = the “link” list. Cata-list is a great example of this; the site sorts lists of links into articles, media, tools & quotes (with images of each site).
- TIL = running list of TILs with a thought per note. Can link to bookmarks if needed. Snippets can also be included here!
- Longform notes = I guess this would be your stereotypical blog post.
but like how do i set this up tho.
Long sectioned notes vs. multiple short notes
I have the attention span of a goldfish . I definitely did not spend a few minutes after writing that sentence googling “goldfish attention span”.
If things are not in front of me, they may as well not be there.
Problem: Organizing longer notes may be difficult without a smooth navigation system. I could implement Scrollspy in Hugo for navigation of long posts. Not sure if this work work for a list page of multiple shorter notes.
Problem: How do I decide which notes make up the longer notes?
Problem: How would I not get lost in a sea of short notes?
Notetaking Automation
Bookmarks
The amount of time I’ve spent trying new bookmarking solutions is kind of embarrassing. When it comes to information & links, I really do have a bit of a hoarding problem.
I need a bookmarking solution that is easy to use across every platform that I could potentially encounter.
Currently, I am using a mix between Zotero , browser bookmarks, Microsoft Edge collections, an iOS shortcut that creates a new markdown post in Working Copy from a Safari link sent via the share screen, messaging apps (Skype, Telegram) and more!
The huge fucking problem with this is that I can never remember where I saved that one thing that I forgot about. As someone who spends way too much time looking for their keys, phone, airpods (and basically every other belonging)–big. fucking. yikes. (can I get smartypants to work somehow in Obsidian so that I don’t have to look at ugly double dashes).
Storing bookmarks in data or database files
The most simple solution would likely be to store bookmarks in a spreadsheet that can synced with a bookmarks.csv file within a data directory. It wouldn’t be too hard to set up
IFTTT
or
zapier
to auto-append bookmarks as new rows. Editing a csv file is probably going to be easier than editing a YAML file (though I do not have much experience with YAML).
See google-sheets-hugo-bookmarks for an implementation of this.
Other data(base) formats worth looking into: JSON, SQL, no-SQL (at least it’d be educational).
Storing bookmarks with external SaaS providers
All-in-one workspace providers:
- Airtable (it’s pretty!)
- Notion (API and offline access when?)
- Coda
- Confluence .
Bookmark/webclip services:
Storing bookmarks as markdown files via frontmatter
Easy to implement categorization via frontmatter variables. Not sure about long-term usage as the list of files would probably grow to be obnoxious at some point. Would need to implement some sort of batch-editing solution to manipulate the frontmatter in multiple files (though I probably definitely need to implement this anyways).
hugo news is an implementation of this idea. This is a list of bookmarks styled like old reddit (RIP) & generated from a folder of markdown files with each bookmark populating the frontmatter of a file.
Storing bookmarks in a static YAML file
This would be easy to manipulate, but not sure how feasible it would be to manage. Would need to implement some way of automating link saving to the YAML file from multiple different platforms: computer (work, home, public), phone, etc.
See Static Marks and Hugo Academic Bookmarks (HAB) for implementations of this idea.
Note: HAB stores the YAML file in the data directory, and a python script has to be run to generate the static HTML page.
Miscellaneous Ideas & Wants
Every mega-list needs an “other” section!
boxed blockquotes as alerts/asides/admonitions (whatever they call them these days) because they look cool AND because my desire for a quick and easy alert system > having an entire element dedicated to something I don’t really need.
modify the tailwindcss typography plugin to make it less ugly (read: more legible) or just scrap it.
desired content sections:
- notes for braindumps like this one
- snippets for code snippets
- bookmarks for webpages
- perhaps series to link notes about a specific topic?