photo by me, London 2012, license CC BY SAToday I deleted the Green Elephant. Ever since I removed Gmail and other Google services back in 2016, Evernote was next in line, but harder to get rid off.
Last year July when I started using Obsidian, I almost immediately realised and quickly experienced how it opened up space for me to finally ditch Evernote. I used Evernote last in August 2020. This February I exported all my Evernotes and started bringing them into my growing collection of mark down text files, with Obsidian as a viewer.
Today I deleted my Evernote account. It felt slightly odd. Even if I hadn’t touched Evernote in over 8 months, even if I had exported everything and double checked that it worked, there still was some lingering sense of dread of the finality of punching the delete button. But after 11 years of Evernote, the Green Elephant is no longer in my room, and another single point of failure and the final silo that part of my workflow depended upon is now gone.
@ton I am still dependent on the excellent web clipper of Evernote. Dunno how to replace it.
I’ve been using Zotero for over a year now. It is one of the elements that allowed me to leave Evernote, as it can automagically fetch scientific papers and their metadata for me, store web pages, clip PDFs from my browser etc.
Thanks to Nick Milo and Eleanor Konik discussing Eleanor’s Zotero/Obsidian workflow on YouTube, I found Bryan Jenks’ video on the same topic. Bryan Jenks’ nicely explains something I had seen other people reference.
First he discusses two Zotero plugins that are very useful to me:
Zotfile, this allows me to annotate and comment an article, and then extract and store that inside Zotero, with links back to the paper and the location in the paper the annotations and articles belong to.
MDnotes, which allows you to export material from Zotero in markdown.
Together they allow me to higlight and annotate an article, and export that as notes into my Obsidian notes. Even better, those notes have the links to the paper and page of an annotation still in them. Clicking them opens up Zotero in the right article, in the right spot. This way context is maintained while I further process my notes, and the actual reference is just a single click away.
This is already very nice and smooth.
Then towards the end he mentions another very useful thing: Dean Jackson‘s Alfred workflow for Zotero, Zothero, which a.o. allows fancy search methods of my Zotero database right from my main screen.
Half an hour very well spent, thanks to Bryan Jenkins.
Today at 14:07 it is exactly 19 years ago I published the first post on this blog. Back then I already mention how connecting to others, conversation, is the key thing I’m aiming for. I’ve always been a prolific note maker (going back to primary school even, buying my own notepads). With the launch of my weblog it became a more public thing as well as a means to engage with others.
In recent years I’ve marked the occasion by reflecting on my blogging and practices (see the 18, 17, 16 years edition), and long ago I marked the 3rd and 5th anniversary both extolling the value of the conversations and connections this blog helped create.
This year, as most of last year was spent working from home. It meant a similar internal oriented focus when it comes to my note making and blogging.
I haven’t spend time on IndieWeb community organising for instance, didn’t feel the energy for it either. I did make steps towards making this blog much less dependent on third parties:
I stopped embedding Flickr images in my blog, replacing them with locally hosted copies while linking to the original. Most postings now no longer have Flickr embeds, some 150 still do, which I am slowly bringing down to 0.
I removed all video embeds, replacing them with stills and links
I slowly replaced a number of Slideshare decks, but not all yet. There are no actual slideshare embeds active anymore on my blog, as I deleted my account, but the now non-functional embeds still ‘call’ those web adresses. I’m self-hosting my slides on tonz.nl (Dutch), and tonz.eu (English)
I experimented with sharable bookshelves for my blog, but there’s a connection missing with my internal note taking. I’d very much like to directly generate my book lists and book posts directly from my own notes. I haven’t actually posted about books here since January, a fact I dislike.
That brings me to the note making part. I have completely removed myself from Evernote, replacing it with a local collection of notes in markdown. I’ve kept them separate of the notes collection I actually work with, but import specific notes when I need them. I also, based on an example from fellow Obsidian user Wouter Groeneveld, started scanning my paper notebooks from over the years, creating indexes for them, and thus making them connect to my ongoing work and notes. My use of Obsidian to maintain those markdown notes continues undiminished. The speed of creating new conceptual nodes has slowed a lot, having mined most of my old blogposts for their content. I am now slowly evolving my ways of digesting and adding new knowledge and thoughts. In terms of volume, there are now some 5k notes, of which 1k6 are conceptual, 1k are ‘collected stuff’ with just a few added remarks of why I find them interesting, and some 2k5 work related notes.
In general I would like to see a more direct connection between my notes and my blogging, and ‘wiki’ pages on this site. I’m not sure yet what I’d like so I need to experiment. In the past months I have been contributing to two GitHub hosted sites using Respec, where the site is directly created from my notes. This works really well, but as those are public pages I do keep the corresponding notes in a different place than my ‘real’ notes. I do want to maintain the difference between public and private, as it influences my writing, but I do not necessarily want to keep the public notes in a separate location from the others.
Coincidentally, around note making, I did do some outreach and hosted two ‘Dutch language Obsidian user meet-ups‘. The third is due to take place in two weeks.
For the coming time this note-to-blog pipeline, and making it easier for myself to post, will be my area of attention I think. Let’s see next year around this time, when I hit the two decade mark with this blog, how that went.
How I took notes in 2006, on a locally hosted wiki
In reply to On taking notes and syndicating them by zblesk
Thank you for writing that! I too find it highly interesting to see how other people arrange their workflows, choose their tools and what they do with them. Often there are things that spark an idea or suggest a useful tweak to my own workflows. So thank you for making a comparison between how you work and what I wrote about how I work.
A few reactions to some of the things you mention.
My perspective on (personal) knowledge management is centered around the notion that I should have everything under my fingertips, and should be able to fully determine my own choice of tools. Tools one can preferably tweak, reshape or replace easily. I started taking notes in the early 1990’s and local text files were the most basic choice I made (and one of the few I then could make). Later convenience lured me into other things like Evernote, and Things for tasks, but I’ve returned to that basic starting point of using text files more recently.
At the core are these notions I hold:
Local first. I’m from an era that connectivity can’t be taken for granted, and regularly work in settings where that is still true. It is also a dependency that even when it is usually reliable, probably carries a high cost if it does fail, as that most likely is in key moments (basically a version of the demo effect).
Agency over tools. Tools must provide actual agency. A key part of it is being able to fully control it’s deployment and use, being able to tweak it etc. Tools must be smaller than us in that sense (not in a literal sense). Convenience may make me ignore this factor up to a certain point, but in the end having control over my tools always comes back up as an issue. Not having such control ultimately always turns a tool into a single point of failure. (Gmail and Evernote are prime examples to me) That drives me to simpler tools within my own scope of control and power to manipulate, and only allowing more complexity if it increases my personal agency significantly. It also means to me that tools need to be useful on their own, and more useful when networked.
Personal tools. Tools need to be adaptable to the person using it. That makes it easier to make those tools smarter. As personal preferences can be assumed as the defaults, and personal routines are predictable to the person itself. Predictable routines plus preferences equal functions and parameters, i.e. code.
Personal agency is always in the context of networked agency. In most settings the unit of agency is not the individual but a small group of connected people trying to solve something that is important to the group itself. Whatever tools the group uses should be within the scope of control of that same group. As a group’s notion of local is usually a networked notion, my local stuff needs to be able to connect (yet not depend on it). Distribution is important here. Centralisation is mostly to be avoided as it carries a cost in overhead, control and resilience.
Put that all together, and indeed POSSE basically becomes the prime directive for everything.
On PHP: I’ve been using PHP for about 20 years. When I create something as a personal tool, it makes sense to just grab the building blocks I’m already familiar with. I’ve always run a local webserver on my pc/laptop, and writing up a few lines of PHP and dropping it in a folder my local webserver uses, makes it fast and easy. Easier at least than getting to know new frameworks, or whatnot. Javascript never appealed to me even if it is from the same 1990’s era, nor succeeded in making much sense to me. Apart from doing browser side things with it in an HTML page.
On WordPress: I used to handcode my sites, until I started using Movable Type shortly after I initiated my blog (hosted on a webserver at home). That was written in Perl which I was comfortable with having written my then employer’s first intranet in it. A decade later I switched to WordPress when my Movable Type install suddenly stopped working completely. I see you use Ghost, which ran a kickstarter I supported shortly after I switched to WordPress (self hosted on an external hosting package). By the time Ghost saw its first release I didn’t act on my earlier idea of running that on a home server. I’m not particularly attached to WP (also used Drupal heavily for other sites), and use it pretty bare bones, but it has served me well for the last 10 years. The switch to Gutenberg and blocks though has me thinking I might maybe go for something simpler.
On Obsidian / Joplin: I also use Joplin, but haven’t tweaked it like you have, I use it out of the box. It’s where my Evernote exports live, which from there I export to md files as needed. I treat Obsidian as a viewer, and Joplin too. Because of that I dislike that Joplin stores stuff locally in an sqlite database, obscuring the contents from my filesystem that way. From a viewer it then becomes an obscurer. Currently Obsidian has my sympathy, that may change, no tool is forever. So in my choices of e.g. plugins for Obsidian I avoid things that provide functionality that comes with a type of lock-in, where if you stop using a plugin part of your information disappears or is hard to get at because it was in a database not in the notes. I dislike YAML frontmatter too. For the Dataview plugin I use inline datafields (key:: value) which makes them a regular part of the note itself. Only when for some automation I need to know where to easily find a data field, I will put it at the top (but still not as YAML frontmatter).
On public RSS subscriptions: yes, I post a list of all the feeds I subscribe to. I treat them as individual’s voices (so no feeds from news outlets etc), and group them by my perceived social distance. I treat blogging and interacting with feeds as distributed conversations.
(also posted to Indienews)