Meta note
This is a store of permanent, Atomic Notes. They are meant to be portable and exportable. They are linked to each other and tagged with some basic tags.
These notes were Notion-based, but now live here in Obsidian. If Obsidian ever gets dumb they can be fairly easily migrated to whatever else. In service of defending that portability, I am going to avoid as many Obsidian-specific and 3rd-party dependencies as possible.
Content
I have decided not to include other people’s writing (beyond simple quotes) in this repository, because I don’t want other people’s writing to confuse my searches. If I search the pile, I want what comes up to be my take.
These notes are also not meant to be logs1. They are meant to be Evergreen Notes. They do not record details about events of my life or particulars about things that aren’t universal. Ideally these Notes would be of value to anyone who may stumble across them. If that’s you, hi! I hope I’m not dead. If I am dead tell my family I love them.
At one point I was using the Dataview Plug-in, Excalidraw plugin, and DrawIO plugin for making these notes more “rich”, but ultimately this made them less portable, less easily published. So I’ve tried to remove those dependencies.
Backlinks & Outgoing Links
The best feature of any PKM app is back-linking. Each of my notes has a “Related” section
Structure
Frontmatter
The Frontmatter contains aliases for the notes and tags. It also contains a “created” date, which is (unfortunately) incorrect for most dates at this point. Anything that says July 08, 2023 was actually created before that date. That’s just the date the whole kit-and-caboodle was migrated from Notion to Obsidian.
Body
Many notes have an opening paragraph or statement (typically bold) that serves as a summary, but not all. then the body, which you’re looking at now. The body may be separated out into sections, but I try to limit that (due to atomicity).
Bottom Bits
Finally, there are some standard sections at the bottom, each of which serve a purpose beyond what their title might suggest.
Source is for looking up more stuff you may not have seen yet about the note (in addition to note attribution), and Related Notes is meant to be more than a collection of links that you could find in the body, but instead a more considered “here’s what you could jump to next”, more like a train of thoughts. If this were a true Zettelkasten this would be the index system (that alternates letters and numbers) that allows branches of thought to exist.
The Related footer is not meant to be an exhaustive collection of related notes. Instead these are notes that “feel” related to me, but weren’t necessarily included in the body of the note. For the exhaustive list of related notes, see Backlinks & Outgoing Links.
Some notes (like this one) have Footnotes2. This text is here for pseudo-completeness.
History
I’ve been interested in notetaking since before I knew “knowledge management” was a thing. I wrote about my disappointment with the notetaking application landscape in Column #166 back in 2014. I stumbled across the concept of the Zettelkasten and plaintext notes shortly after discovering Notion. My first notes were about Zettelkasten Components, appropriately enough, and they were dated March 15th, 2020. Interestingly, as of January, 2024 I’ve made on average almost exactly 1 new note per day. Neat.
Source
- themselves!