Organizing my visual book notes by topic

| blogging, 11ty

I want to start building up more thoughts as chunks and relating them more logically instead of just chronologically. I've been using categories to organize my posts into buckets, but within a category, it's still chronological. I also have a large outline that includes posts from 2017 to 2024. I'd like to break it up into smaller topic pages so that they're easier to link to, although it's a little more challenging to search.

Now that I have a nice gallery view for my visual book notes, I wanted to organize the book notes by topic. I made an async Eleventy paired shortcode called gallerylist that lets me turn a list of links into into thumbnails and links.

I also modified org-html-toc to not include the Table of Contents header and to tweak the HTML attributes assigned to it.

New table of contents code 
(defun my-org-html-toc (depth info &optional scope)
  "Build a table of contents.
DEPTH is an integer specifying the depth of the table.  INFO is
a plist used as a communication channel.  Optional argument SCOPE
is an element defining the scope of the table.  Return the table
of contents as a string, or nil if it is empty."
  (let ((toc-entries
   (mapcar (lambda (headline)
       (cons (org-html--format-toc-headline headline info)
       (org-export-get-relative-level headline info)))
     (org-export-collect-headlines info depth scope))))
    (when toc-entries
      (let* ((toc-id-counter (plist-get info :org-html--toc-counter))
             (toc (concat (format "<div class=\"text-table-of-contents toc-id%s\" role=\"doc-toc\">"
                                  (if toc-id-counter (format "-%d" toc-id-counter) ""))
        (org-html--toc-text toc-entries)
        "</div>\n")))
        (plist-put info :org-html--toc-counter (1+ (or toc-id-counter 0)))
  (if scope toc
    (let ((outer-tag (if (org-html--html5-fancy-p info)
             "nav"
           "div")))
      (concat (format "<%s class=\"table-of-contents toc-id%s\" role=\"doc-toc\">\n"
                            outer-tag
                            (if toc-id-counter (format "-%d" toc-id-counter) ""))
              ;; (let ((top-level (plist-get info :html-toplevel-hlevel)))
              ;; (format "<h%d>%s</h%d>\n"
              ;;   top-level
              ;;   (org-html--translate "Table of Contents" info)
              ;;   top-level))
        toc
        (format "</%s>\n" outer-tag))))))))

(with-eval-after-load 'org
  (defalias 'org-html-toc #'my-org-html-toc))

This is what my visual book notes topic page looks like now:

2024-10-25_09-23-26.png
Figure 1: Screenshot of visual book notes

I can improve on this by using the topic maps to determine next/previous links for the posts. Someday!

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