You folks are still the best

mediapathic

Hey everyone. Some of you might remember me from long looooong ago...

I used The Archive for a long time. Since then I've progressed through org-mode, obsidian, and any number of other weird tools for my linked writing. At the moment, I'm mostly using neovim with Renee's (remember Renee? He's still around!) Telekasten plug-in (check it out if you're using neovim).

Anyway, on a whim, I opened The Archive tonight to see how it would deal with the bizarre mess that my zettelkasten is. It works, flawlessly. The only issue is that I had to abandon putting things into subdirectories, which is something that I had been considering doing anyway. So, I did that, and, just in playing around, I got more actual useful connected thinking done tonight than I have in a long, long time.

Much love to Christian and Sascha, again.

Long Live The Archive.

Sascha

Heeey,

welcome back @mediapathic .

So, I did that, and, just in playing around, I got more actual useful connected thinking done tonight than I have in a long, long time.

If my hypothesis on cognitive screen loading is correct, it is for the same reason why software like iA Writer offers a similar effect to writers who are used to MS word.

Very happy to have you back.

Will

Welcome back, @mediapathic.

It's poly cool to have you back.

What a long strange trip it's been. So far, I've resisted the urge to try different note-taking apps. Your experience frightens me. It sounds like you were wandering in the desert, searching for a home. Well, welcome home.

mediapathic

Your experience frightens me. It sounds like you were wandering in the desert, searching for a home. Well, welcome home.

Actually, it's not been too bad. The real lesson in all of this has been retaining tool agnosticism. The switch between markdown and org was deeply annoying, and there are still artifacts of that throughout my vault ("2020-10-24.org.md" and the like with weird syntax in, but, it's at least still searchable text). And Obsidian is great, but the plugin system tempts one to use methods that only work in Obsidian (dataview is amazing, but outside Obsidian renders as a search, not as the results). And occasional issues with sync services have led to some data loss (but there are backups). But as long as the text is still text, all can be recovered.

My current methodologies:

• Unique filenames, manually, with no UID in filename, for readability.
• UID still generated but kept in header
• single directory for everything except
  • daily files (kept in subdirectory, this makes search cleaner)
  • bookmarks (I use nb on the command line to create bookmarks, one markdown file per bookmark. I'm still using obsidian to auto-move these on creation, but that's just a convenience.
  • a subdirectory called "GTD" for work-related lists and projects. I'm considering moving all of these to the main directory, but haven't decided yet if that's a good idea.

A header looks like this:

---
alias: 
---
%%
creation_date:: [[2023-06-29]]
tags::
uid:: 202306291243
%%

The double percents hide metadata in obsidian, but that's just cosmetic, and they don't get in the way. The double "::" is what obsidian dataview uses for searches, but I've retained that even not using dataview because it's sometimes a useful unique string for searches.

Thank you for the kind words.