It’s nice when things can be frictionless, in this case thanks to Github and Respec.
For a client I’m keeping track of the coming EU legal framework on digitisation and data, and I do that within my markdown note taking system (using Obsidian.md as viewer on text files on my computer). With the client we are doing outreach to a wide range of government data holders, and for that purpose we’ve launched a public site with current factual information about the EU legal framework for them to re-use.
The site is hosted on Github, and we’re using Respec to incorporate markdown files as source for the web pages.
This way maintaining the site is a breeze: I am doing my regular work, keeping notes in my own preferred environment. The folder which has my notes on the EU framework is synced with a github repository and the Respec script uses it for the site. Whenever I change something in my notes in the regular flow of work, I don’t have to also think about changing the site, that will happen when it gets pushed to Github. ‘Living’ documentation is something I regularly aim for within client projects, and the current set-up for this client makes it very easy.
A week that felt almost as normal as before All This. Even though it is a new normal, not a return (and being aware that we’re heading into the fall with rising numbers of cases again).
This week I
Compared the vision document for upgrading the national geo-information infrastructure with the emerging EU legal framework and Green Deal to see where they align or not
Presented to the geo information policy team at the Ministry for the Interior
Did the monthly invoicing
Had the weekly client meetings, this time in person, and spending half of my time at client offices
Finished the first full iteration of a public client wiki. It contains information on the upcoming EU legal framework for digitisation and data. It is created directly from mark down notes in my personal collection, pushing them to a repository on Github, that using Respec gets turned into a website on github.io. That works really well.
Spent an afternoon in the cinema, to see Dune. Now rereading the novel itself.
Did a first detailed check of which elements in the EU framework on digitisation and data need to be incorporated or translated into the national reference architecture for (public sector) digital twins.
Had a half day session with the reference architecture team to discuss that
Drove Y to Haarlem for a sleep over with her nieces.
Went out for (Thai food) dinner with E, and had a few beers together sitting at the bar of the oldest pub in town Onder de Linden (continuously since 1755 in a 1530 building). It’s the pub where E set her prize winning story about Amersfoort she wrote last year, but never visited before. It was very nice to just hang out with the two of us.
On the way into town for dinner and beers, my bicycle broke down (so we walked back home and took public transport). Saturday morning was spent to select and buy a replacement bike. I thought to buy a second hand one, but ended up with a affordabel new one, which I will pick up Tuesday. I think this is the first new bike I bought in my life. The bicycle my parents bought me for secondary school lasted me through university, and since then I had 2 second hand ones each one lasting a little over a decade or so. I leave my bike at railway stations a lot, so having something that looks too fancy just gets stolen.
Had coffee and lunch in town with E, before picking up Y again at her nieces’
Drove to Enschede to visit friends. Cees is a (press) photographer and opened a small exhibition of some of his photos in Het Bolwerk, Enschede’s oldest continuously operating pub (this one 1904, so nowhere in the same league as the oldest Amersfoort one). We had lunch in and walked around our former home town a bit. Afterwards we went back to our friends’ place and chatted over food and drinks.
Had a conversation with Andy Sylvester for his ‘tools for thought’ podcast, talking about my use of Obsidian and Tinderbox mostly.
In the Bolwerk café for the opening of Cees’ photo exhibit, in Enschede.
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