**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. To defend that portability, I avoid as many Obsidian-specific and 3rd-party dependencies as possible. ![[IMG_1225.png]] ## 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 [[Capturing Logs|logs]][^1]. 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. Obsidian handles this automatically, and generates the graph showing the web of notes and their links. ## 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 Components|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]]. I’ve migrated away from using the “related” section much. Some notes (like this one) have **Footnotes**[^2]. This text is here for pseudo-completeness. [^1]:My [[PDW]] is for that. [^2]:Like this. ## 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](https://aarongilly.com/166/). 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. Thus they got started right as the COVID pandemic kicked off. They are, thankfully, my long lasting ramifications of that pandemic. Interestingly, as of January, 2024 I've made on average almost exactly 1 new note per day. Neat. That number has bumped up slightly over the succeeding 6 months, now I'm at ~1.08 notes/day. Because I moved my body of notes off Notion on July 8th, 2023, that's when most of them are dated. Not having an actual dataset for note creation count over time from 2020 to mid-2023 is a bummer. **** ### Source - themselves! ### Related - [[Smart Notes Standard Workflow]] - [[Zettelkasten Components]]