The Archive, ZettelID and seconds

thoresson

@ctietze, are you considering adding an option to include seconds in the timestamp when creating a new note? I just realized that my current workflow on iOS creates a lot of notes within the same minute, meaning I have a lot of manual editing to do afterwards. (I create new notes in Drafts as I read articles on my iPad, then sending them to Dropbox in a rapid sequence when done.)

ctietze

In The Archive, I resorted to taking up the next minute's slot if necessary. But IDs will be configurable in a future update, so you can add even more digits

thoresson

I found a solution to this in Drafts: To use creation time as zid instead of the time when I push the note from Drafts to my archive.

Kolame

Bringing this up again because I wonder how this is handled right now. If I create a note or what I would consider a 'Folgezettel' via creating a time stamp (cmd+u) in [[brackets]], adding a title, click/search that now created link and pressing enter for creating a new note (as described/shown here: I can run into the problem of creating two similar time-stamps, when e.g. writing rather two (ore more) short notes within one minute, because cmd+u-timestamping doesn't use the next available time slot (for good reason). Do you have a solution for that problem which doesn't involve manually manipulating the IDs?

Thank you!

ctietze

⌘U should prevent conflicts by incrementing the minute, if needed. For that to work, the ID has to come first in the file name, otherwise the app won't be able to recognize it, though.

Kolame

Just tried again and of course you are correct. I can't reproduce the problem again. Thank you

pat

Command-U only prevents conflicts if you use it when naming a file, or if you create a file immediately after using it.

You can’t use the technique in that video to create multiple “forward links” in quick succession - they’ll all have the same ID. For this to work, The Archive would have to examine all notes’ content to ensure a unique ID, rather than simply the names. I don’t know if that’s reasonable or not. I personally would like that behavior.

ctietze

That's a very accurate description of the current limitation! I'll take note of your idea to look in the whole archive of notes for conflicts. Could be a reasonable heuristic, too, to look just "anywhere" and not merely inside file names. We'll have to experiment with this in case I overlook any downsides, though

pryley

@pat If you are currently using Alfred on your Mac, I made a workflow which may be of interest as it also handles unique UIDs by incrementing them by the minute in the same way The Archive does.

Currently it only checks the note titles to make sure the UID is unique, but I can look into adding an option to make sure the UID is unique throughout the note contents as well if this is something people would like.

https://github.com/pryley/alfred-the-archive/blob/master/README.md