Digital gardening¶
If I had to pick a dominant thread throughout my life, it would be: exploring new ways to organise my notes and knowledge. As a teenager, I typed out paper index cards, to track lemmas in my parents' encyclopedia. Since then, I tried different tools and systems (like Zettelkasten).
Today, I'm starting yet another chapter, and will call it digital gardening: the trend to make more of my notes available on my public website. In my case: I combine Obsidian to take notes, with Material for MkDocs to publish them.
My journey¶
For my very first personal website, some 30 years ago now, I worked with plain text files and a tool to convert them into a website.
Since then, I started using different tools for the two tasks: note-taking and publishing. Those tools had their own interfaces and data standards. That meant: friction and barriers when moving my content between them.
The famous book "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" observes: some people accept a dripping tap, and learn to live with it. Others want to fix the tap, no matter what.
I have an engineering mindset, and I want to fix the tap. At the peril of not having results, because I enjoy tinkering with the tools so much.
Step 1: note-taking¶
I have my private notes and ideas: I'd like to capture them quickly, and keep them available offline, on my own device, as plain text.
Almost two years ago, I switched to Obsidian as my note-taking tool.
After many years working with Zim, I ran into limitations with its plain-text markup language. I looked at other markup languages, and suitable WYSYWIG editors for them. In the end, Obsidian and Markdown won. It also helped me improve managing my work, on top of keeping my notes.
Step 2: publishing notes¶
I want to share (mostly technical) notes: experiences, how-tos, overviews, and so on. A similar system to my private notes, but public.
I started working with Asciidoc as a technical documentation standard, and Antora as a multiple-repository publishing tool. I still think Asciidoc is a better standard than Markdown, but just as with the XML vs. JSON debate, the popular vote wins and results in a wider variety of tools.
My work changed too, so a multiple-repository-single-website tool became far less important to me.
Earlier this year, I had a chance to look at how Material for MkDocs can publish Markdown files managed with Obsidian, in a format that suits my desires and needs. It reduces a lot of friction in moving content from my note-taking to my publishing activities.
Step 3: one website¶
I want to combine my updates and ideas with my notes in a single website, to make it easier to link between them, and search across everything.
I used Wordpress for my updates for quite a while. I tried to combine it with Antora for my notes. It was a lot of fun tinkering, but did not get me where I really wanted.
Combining Obsidian and Material for MkDocs seems to offer just enough for my current needs:
- I can develop rough ideas in my Personal Knowledge Management vault, and easily copy them to my website vault.
- I can connect ideas, blogs, and technical notes more easily.
- I can publish it as an energy-efficient and privacy-friendly static website.
- But: I miss features, too, like: letting users interact via comments or social media like Mastodon.
Reflections¶
It is interesting to realise I am back where I once started: plain text notes, published as a static website.
I will document my approach on my site. I have taken ideas from others on the web, and I want to share mine. That also comes with a warning:
This is probably not for you
This (like my earlier attempts) is a bespoke attemp to solve my own problem in my context.
I have always crafted my own tools and scripts: it works for me, and I enjoy doing it. Maybe it helps you to develop your own approach. But it is not a cookie-cutter solution.
As Stephen King describes so well in "On Writing": you need to build your own toolkit for the work you do. Just as you do your own personal knowledge management.
It is a fun journey if you like tinkering with tools.