Tag: habits

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I have been using Hypothes.is, an annotation platform, for a bit over 3 years now (my account is 4 years old).
Storing bookmarks and creating annotations that way is easy. A browser add-on makes it one click (and the writing of course) to add an annotation.

Using the Hypothes.is Obsidian plugin also means any annotation comes into my notes seamlessly through the Hypothes.is API.

I use the same API to be able to post to Hypothes.is from within my personal feedreader’s reading flow (I can also post directly to my Obsidian notes there). This means I can annotate something without opening it separately in the browser at all.

Over time I’ve looked in wonder at the speed and volume with which Chris Aldrich uses Hypothes.is on a daily basis. To me it indicates that it is his main connection between his browsing and his rough notes. He hit 10k annotations three years ago already.

Although I have mostly reduced friction for making annotations themselves, my mental model of annotations and my practice haven’t much shifted since I started using Hypoythes.is in earnest in August 2022. (Around the time Chris mentioned above hit 10k annotations.)
One pitfall is similar to ‘I should write proper blog posts‘, ‘I should properly annotate‘. Meaning not having more than 1 annotation for a site or posting isn’t ‘proper’. Only annotating things I’m reading with focus count! That sort of thing. It means a much stricter curation than necessary. The only actual question is if I want to be able to find something back again. If so, then I should add it. It’s not only annotation, it’s bookmarking too.

That goes hand in hand with me more deliberately setting aside time for myself to explore things online. Something that I lost sight of a good while ago. Finding my way back to a sense of wonder, also means wandering about online, starting from a question or notion, and following the breadcrumbs others have left on the open web. This is the good old web-surfing habit of old.

The past week I deliberately spent more time browsing and bookmarking/annotating. My annotations jumped by over 100. As a result I added several interesting scientific papers to my Zotero library, added a few books to my library, and generally had a good time finding things I didn’t know I was looking for.

Hopefully this evolves in a stronger habit of bookmarking and annotation.

Two things I intend to do, to reduce friction for this even more.
One, currently from within my feedreader I can post to either my blog or to Hypothes.is, but not both. I want to change that, so that the same thing can serve two purposes simultaneously. (Or better yet, not for now, what if I could have my own instance of hypothes.is that is also visible as a category / stream in my website?)
Two, I haven’t figured out yet if I can get hypothes.is to work on mobile, for the initial bookmarking of a site. My mobile browser regularly has a lot of open tabs at the end of a day, some of it useful to retain.

Today I hit 1700 bookmarks and annotations. Let’s see where that number stands in 3 months, as a measure of a renewed bookmarking and annotation habit.

For 2019’s Q1 I want to do a ‘weekly hack’. There are many small odd jobs around the house, on my computer, our network, or in my workflows. They often are in my todo lists, but never get done, simply because they never have any urgency attached to them and so the rest of my life goes first. Yet they often do hinder me, and keep nagging to be resolved. Either that or they are the small wished for fixes (I really should have a page for X / I really should make a template for Y).

So 12 ‘hacks’, fixes or odd jobs in Q1 2019 it is. If it becomes a habit after that it will mean doing some 4 dozen small things to make life easier per year. That’s a lot of things done incrementally over time. A first braindump gave me some 20 things to choose from (and the one I ended up doing first wasn’t even on that original list, but came to me later 😉 ).

  • 19#01 Create and use a template for the first read through and note taking of a non-fiction book.
    I made it in Tinderbox, which is an outliner plus mapping tool by Mark Bernstein. The template is mostly based on this WikiHow page on reading non-fiction, with some added questions (e.g. concerning assumptions made by the author)

    (the template in map and in outline view).
    For each book I copy that template. Each element in the outline/map is also a note which can have text, images etc. Tinderbox then lets you export the whole thing as a document, in this case the summary of my reading notes of a book. Which can then be blogged or published in other ways. [Category: workflow, habits]
  • 19#02 Did an edit in Open Street Map. For a long time open data consultant and activist, I actually do very little with data. My focus is on helping government entities change, so that their data becomes available routinely and at high quality. So, while Open Street Map (OSM) is a re-users of large amounts of Dutch open government data I never actually edited something in it. Peter’s suggestion this week triggered me to change that. [Category: learning]
  • 19#03 Export notes from presentation deck. I regularly give presentations, and use the speaker notes to write out the story and to present. Writing up the presentation story afterwards I used to copy by hand the presenter notes to my text editor and then turn it into a blogpost. This is however time consuming (copy and pasting text from each slide). To make that easier I searched for an applescript online and adapted it to my use. Now copying the notes to the clipboard is just one click, and then it is stored in my ClipMenu tool to past into whatever editor or word processor I want to use it in. Available from github.
  • 19#04 Add an ‘on this day’ function. To show blogposts from earlier years on the current day. Added and fixed a plugin, that provides a shortcode.
  • 19#05 Automatically transform bank journal entries into procurement journal entries Made an Applescript that takes the bank journal entries from my double entry book keeping system as csv, and then for the entries that are marked as procurement, creates the correct entry for the procurement journal. Output is in CSV again, which I can directly import into my book keeping system. Script published on github
  • 19#06 I redid my changes to the Semantic Backlinks plugin to display webmentions differently on my site. After an update my earlier changes had been overwritten. So following my own earlier documentation, I fixed it again.
  • 19#07 Fixed the authorization header issue on my site. This was keeping me from using microsub and micropub applications to post to my site. Having tried various things suggested online, in the end the Drupal fora provided the right answer. Adding RewriteRule .* – [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}] to htaccess solved the issue
  • 19#08 Added experimental check-ins to the blog. Ultimately I’d like to recreate the Plazes and Dopplr experience, available to just my network.
  • 19#09 Wrote a new front page text for my professional web presence.
  • 19#10 Redid all the tile stones on the roof terrace, in preparation for putting some plants, berries, there.
  • 19#11 Convinced a site I’m following to switch to a full article text rss feed, replacing the title/summary only feed they had before. I had asked them a long time ago, and they wouldn’t saying it was too difficult. This time, figuring out which CMS they used I included the description of where in the settings to make changes. Positive response within the hour. Lesson: enable people to act by including what they need to do so.
  • 19#12 Growing more edible things for the little one, and ourselves Got berry shrubs (and planters) for the roof terrace. Blueberries, red berries, raspberries, and blackberries. It gets a lot of sun up there. Hopefully that translates into lots of berries.