Share with us what is happening in your ZK journey this week. November 23, 2024

Will

Current ZK Report

Swimming with Ideaså

This is yet another opportunity to share what you are working on with your friends here on the forum. Add to this discussion by telling us about your zettelkasten journey. Share with us what you’re learning. Sharing helps us clarify our goals and visualize our thinking. And sometimes, a conversation sparks a magical moment where we can dive into an idea worth exploring. I’d love to hear more from you. 🫵🏼

Do you want to do a live video chat with me about our adventures in Zettelkasting? Ping me at @Will, and we can schedule a time.

Here is my report on why I’m here and my current ZK work themes and ideas:

• I’ve moved the writing projects for JAMM425 Magazine Writing to the web. These are markdown files in my ZK with hard links to a folder where I can run Git and GitHub’s 'Pages’ and use Jekyl with a Bootstrap theme to push them to the web. I can still edit them in The Archive’s editor. This is working slick. Now, I’m tweaking the web look. It is a work in progress but take a look. JAMM425 Magazine Feature Writing
• I'm busy interviewing people for my in-depth feature story on the evolution in cartography from paper maps to GIS.
• I'm glad to see The Archive's plugin system has reached public beta.

Books I’m reading or read this week:

• Blundell, William E. The Art and Craft of Feature Writing: Based on the Wall Street Journal Guide. New American Library, 1988. [[202408212021]] #JAMM425 Bookshare
• Dicks, Matthew. Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling. New World Library, 2018. Bookshare
• Tatel, David S. Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice. First edition, Little, Brown and Company, 2024. Kindle [[202411030530]]1

Zettelkasting Soundtrack:

• Weber & Weber
• Heather Rigdon
• Lara Louise
• Croquet Club
• Jody Wisternoff
• Luttrell

★★★★★

The "My rolling fourteen-day zettel production" is produced by a script for attachment to my daily journaling template. I do my journaling in Bear to keep personal journaling separate from my knowledge work.

Let me know if you would like to see, discuss, or critique any of these notes.

My fourteen-day zettel production

I hope my contribution is helpful, and I’m sure you have even better ideas.

ctietze

@Will said:

• I’ve moved the writing projects for JAMM425 Magazine Writing to the web. These are markdown files in my ZK with hard links to a folder where I can run Git and GitHub’s 'Pages’ and use Jekyl with a Bootstrap theme to push them to the web. I can still edit them in The Archive’s editor. This is working slick. Now, I’m tweaking the web look. It is a work in progress but take a look. JAMM425 Magazine Feature Writing

That sounds rad!

Can the setup be replicated easily? Maybe others would like to try that, too -- esp. since hosting on GitHub is free and so the experiment only costs time

Idea of the week

Busy week coding -- but there was one delightful article that led me down a small rabbit hole of Richard P Gabriel's writing about "worse is better" from 1989/90.

The hub for this idea is here:
Richard P. Gabriel: "Worse Is Better", https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

And I found it via:
Christine Lemmer-Webber: "How decentralized is Bluesky really?", 2024-11-22, https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

The idea of "worse is better" got connected to Gall's Law, and loosely relates to why idealistic, big software rewrites fail so often. And why things that are imperfect but provide value proliferate.

-- Working on this led me to quickly create a new plug-in to create overview of selected notes. Grab a bunch, invoke the plug-in to "wrap in new note", and you'll be taken to a new rough hub with links to selected notes inside.

Will

At the bottom of JAMM425 Magazine Feature Writing is a link to the source code. You can clone my repo and then customize or use the same template I used from: GitHub - evanwill/workshop-template-b: Jekyll template for simple workshop website, Bootstrap version.

This requires tweaking for each setup. I made hard links to the files in The Archive so I could change the notes, and they are automatically updated on the web.

I'm going to be doing this for every class I take in the future. It puts all my class notes together neatly on my phone, and they are easily shareable.

---

@ctietze said:
-- Working on this led me to quickly create a new plug-in to create overview of selected notes. Grab a bunch, invoke the plug-in to "wrap in new note", and you'll be taken to a new rough hub with links to selected notes inside.

I use a Keyboard Maestro macro to create the first draft of a Structure Note. Can you share your plugin?

ZettelDistraction

Among other things, I pilfered Bob Doto's CLOG note format for project tracking from his A System for Writing. In my system, CLOGs are called FOCUS notes, after the character trait I lack the most. I describe those in another thread on Zettelkasten bankruptcy (the only individual with a solvent Zettelkasten is @Sascha) in which I reveal Zotero is my inbox.

The first project: I disinterred an eleven-year-old Python Flask server to generate random dictionary lookups with a word list of over 170,000 English words. I am only decades behind with this project (vocabulary building has been an obsession) to write a small web server that runs on a Raspberry Pi to display random words and their definitions. The code is available online at https://github.com/flengyel/wordlist. Currently, it's running in the VS Code debugger, but I will move it to its own Raspberry Pi. The word list is missing some interesting words. I'm considering a subscription to a commercial dictionary API service.

The wordlist REST server will return random words from the word list at its root endpoint https://localhost:5000, for example:

{"Word": "Longbenton", "Definitions": ["N: A suburban town in the Metropolitan Borough of North Tyneside, Tyne and Wear, England (OS grid ref NZ2668)."], "Source": "datamuse.com"}

{"Word": "motiles", "Definitions": ["Adj: (biology) In organisms: having the power to move spontaneously.", "Adj: (biology) In organs or organelles: capable of producing motion.", "Adj: (physiology) In organs: having the power to move their contents, or to change their shape or tension by writhing or contracting as required by their particular physiological functions.", "Adj: (psychology) Of or relating to those mental images that arise from the sensations of bodily movement and position.", "N: (psychology) A person whose prevailing mental imagery takes the form of inner feelings of action, such as incipient pronunciation of words, muscular innervations, etc."], "Source": "datamuse.com"}

The wordlist REST server returns JSON at its http://localhost:5000/define/<word> endpoint, as follows.

{"Word": "abjuration", "Definitions": ["N: A solemn recantation or renunciation on oath; as, an abjuration of heresy.", "N: A repudiation on oath of a religious or political principle.", "N: The act of abjuring."], "Source": "datamuse.com"}

The server provides simple HTML search lookup.

Why do this? I wanted a web server to display random dictionary definition lookups.

KillerWhale

I'm having fun again. I've started a fresh Obsidian system as described here with only the important bits and a better approach and it's working great. It's still a pet project, a toy to have "serious" fun into and not intended to replace my main system as many parts still miss, but that's where I'm writing new Zettels, and I've done quite a few on some insights about using Obsidian, what I can or cannot do with it, and some storytelling insights.

• 202406061413 « Small galaxy syndrome », when everybody's related in a world too big for that
• 202411241040 SFF starts with fantastique
• 202411231050 Taste in art: push the envelope while remaining accessible
• 202411141608 An action can be announced or shown, never both
• 202411201422 Primary theme colors
• 202411181844 Specifics of my Obsidian customizations
• 202411151331 Things (almost) impossible to do with Obsidian
• 202411161901 An action that has been announced and happens as planned should not be shown
• 202411161809 Plans that have been laid out can never happen as expected

John_P

I am always delighted when I gain insight into the thoughts and areas of interest of others. By nature, I’m a curious person with a well-developed sense of curiosity. Behind the headlines, there are surely very interesting pieces of information. @KillerWhale

Would it be too forward of me to ask if I might be granted a glimpse?
I’m a firm advocate of open and direct communication—anything else feels insincere.

Thank you for the exchange in this space.

KillerWhale

Thank you @John_P !
My notes are in French unfortunately, I only translated the titles for fun. But if you'd like, here's most of 202411141608:

John_P

Thank you for the reply and the open form of communication. @KillerWhale