I want to get better at making sense of things and sharing what I'm learning. Nudged by Chris Maiorana's post on Second Brain, Second Nature, I borrowed How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens (2017). Here are my notes.

The book goes into detail about Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten or slipbox system. Lots of people have written about Zettelkasten and various implementations. There's even a whole micro-industry around Notion templates. So I won't spend a lot of time right now describing what it is or what the key aspects are. I can focus instead on what that means to me and what I want to do with it.

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.

(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:

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

I customized my visual book notes - all view to show the thumbnails of the images, and I added You can get to it by going to the visual-book-notes category from a post and then choosing "All". I like the new "View slideshow" and "Shuffle slideshow" buttons I added.

I also fixed some of the broken images in older posts, so there should be 43 posts with images now.

Someday I want to add a way to go from the sketch in the slideshow to the post, but it might require upgrading the version of Photoswipe I have. I'm currently on 4.x, which hasn't been updated in years.

Inspired by the styling on Susam's blog feed, I followed this tutorial on using XML stylesheets and added XSL stylesheets for my RSS and Atom feeds. I have RSS and Atom feeds for all my posts as well as for each category or tag (ex: emacs).

To make that happen, I added a line like this to my RSS template:

<?xml-stylesheet href="/assets/rss.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>

and for my Atom template:

<?xml-stylesheet href="/assets/atom.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>

and those refer to:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="3.0"
                xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
                xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"        xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <xsl:output method="html" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
  <xsl:template match="/">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
    <head>
      <title>
        RSS Feed | <xsl:value-of select="/rss/channel/title"/>
      </title>
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/style.css"/>
    </head>
    <body>
      <h1 style="margin-bottom:0">Recent posts: <xsl:value-of select="/rss/channel/title"/></h1>
      <p>
        This is an RSS feed. You can subscribe to <a href=" {/rss/channel/link}"><xsl:value-of select="/rss/channel/link"/></a> in a feed reader such as <a href="https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed">Elfeed</a> for Emacs, <a href="https://www.inoreader.com/">Inoreader</a>, or <a href="https://newsblur.com/">NewsBlur</a>, or you can use tools like <a href="https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email">rss2email</a>. The feed includes the full blog posts.
You can also view the posts on the website at
<a href="{/rss/channel/atom:link[contains(@rel,'alternate')]/@href}"><xsl:value-of select="/rss/channel/atom:link[contains(@rel,'alternate')]/@href" /></a> .
      </p>
      <xsl:for-each select="/rss/channel/item">
        <div style="margin-bottom:20px">
        <div>
          <xsl:value-of select="pubDate" />
        </div>
        <div>
          <a>
            <xsl:attribute name="href">
              <xsl:value-of select="link/@href"/>
            </xsl:attribute>
            <xsl:value-of select="title"/>
          </a></div></div>
      </xsl:for-each>
    </body>
    </html>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="3.0"
                xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
                xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <xsl:output method="html" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
  <xsl:template match="/">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
    <head>
      <title>
        Atom Feed | <xsl:value-of select="/atom:feed/atom:title"/>
      </title>
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/style.css"/>
    </head>
    <body>
      <h1 style="margin-bottom:0">Recent posts: <xsl:value-of select="/atom:feed/atom:title"/></h1>
      <p>
        This is an Atom feed. You can subscribe to <a href=" {/atom:feed/atom:link/@href}"><xsl:value-of select="/atom:feed/atom:link/@href"/></a> in a feed reader such as <a href="https://github.com/skeeto/elfeed">Elfeed</a> for Emacs, <a href="https://www.inoreader.com/">Inoreader</a>, or <a href="https://newsblur.com/">NewsBlur</a>, or you can use tools like <a href="https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email">rss2email</a>. The feed includes the full blog posts.
You can also view the posts on the website at
<a href="{/atom:feed/atom:link[contains(@rel,'alternate')]/@href}"><xsl:value-of select="/atom:feed/atom:link[contains(@rel,'alternate')]/@href" /></a> .
      </p>
      <xsl:for-each select="/atom:feed/atom:entry">
        <div style="margin-bottom:20px">
          <div>
          <xsl:value-of select="substring(atom:updated, 0, 11)" /></div>
          <div><a>
            <xsl:attribute name="href">
              <xsl:value-of select="atom:link/@href"/>
            </xsl:attribute>
            <xsl:value-of select="atom:title"/>
          </a></div></div>
      </xsl:for-each>
    </body>
    </html>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

I come up with way more ideas than I can work on, and that's okay. That's good. It means I can always skim the top for interesting things, and it's fine if things overflow as long as the important stuff stays in the funnel. I'm experimenting with more ways to keep things flowing.

I usually come up with lots of ideas and then revisit my priorities to see if I can figure out 1-3 things I'd like to work on for my next focused time sessions. These priorities are actually pretty stable for the most part, but sometimes an idea jumps the queue and that's okay.

There's a loose net of projects/tasks that I'm currently working on and things I'm currently interested in, so I want to connect ideas and resources to those if I can. If they aren't connected, or if they're low-priority and I probably won't get to them any time soon, it can make a lot of sense to add quick notes and pass it along.

For things I want to think about some more, my audio braindumping workflow seems to be working out as a way to capture lots of text even when I'm away from my computer. I also have a bit more time to sketch while waiting for the kiddo to get ready for bed. I can use the sketchnotes as outlines to talk through while I braindump, and I can take my braindumps and distill them into sketches. Then I can take those and put them into blog posts. Instead of getting tempted to add more and more to a blog post (just one more idea, really!), I can try wrapping up earlier since I can always add a follow-up post. For some things, making a video might be worthwhile, so smoothing out my workflow for creating a video could be useful. I don't want to spend a lot of time filing but I still want to be able to find related notes, so automatically refiling based on tags (or possibly suggesting refile targets based on vector similarity?) might help me shift things out of my inbox.

I'm generally not bothered by the waste of coming up with ideas that I don't get around to, since it's more like daydreaming or fun. I sometimes get a little frustrated when I want to find an interesting resource I remember coming across some time ago and I can't find it with the words I'm looking for. Building more of a habit of capturing interesting resources in my Org files and using my own words in the notes will help while I wait for personal search engines to get better. I'm a little slow when it comes to e-mails because I tend to wait until I'm at my computer–and then when I'm at my computer, I prefer to tinker or write. I occasionally redo things because I didn't have notes from the previous solution or I couldn't find my notes. That's fine too. I can get better at taking notes and finding them.

So I think some next steps for me are:

• Post more toots on @sachac@emacs.ch; might be useful as a firehose for ideas. Share them back to my Org file so I have a link to the discussion (if any). Could be a quick way to see if anyone already knows of related packages/code or if anyone might have the same itch.
• See if I can improve my braindumping/sketch workflow so that I can flesh out more ideas
• Tweak my video process gradually so that I can include more screenshots and maybe eventually longer explanations

I received a Google Open Source Peer Bonus for my contributions to GNU Emacs, which was a pleasant surprise. Thanks!

I'm thinking of ways to reinvest the ~USD 250 award into Emacs and the community to see what a little money earmarked for that could do. People have already donated enough to EmacsConf to cover hosting costs, so that's all sorted out. People have also already sent me more than enough to cover my hosting costs using my ancient pay-what-you-want resources. I wonder how I could use the money to help me make more blog posts and videos.

Speech recognition: Paying for cloud usage will let me do tiny experiments without upgrading my X230T¹ for now. I could start with speech recognition as a way of fleshing out ideas and getting them into text faster. Deepgram charges USD 0.0048/min for batch-processing with Whisper Large and USD 0.0059/min for streaming with their Nova-2 model, so that's… umm… ~860+ hours I could process. Over the past couple of weeks of experimenting with this idea, I've recorded about 1-2 hours of audio braindumps a day, so that's still well over a year of being able to play around with this. (And actually I still have USD ~187 of free trial credits with them, so…)

AI: I might also be able to use AI for outlining/summarizing/cleaning up my audio braindumps. I just have to figure out the right prompts for ChatGPT. Here's one I've been experimenting with so that I can get things into roughly an Org Mode format while still letting me easily look things up in the transcript:

Reorganize this rough transcript into an outline of ideas.

Format it like this:

- item 1
  - details
    - more details
      - verbatim quote from transcript
    - more details
      - verbatim quote from transcript
    - more details
      - verbatim quote from transcript
  - details
    - more details
      - verbatim quote from transcript
    - more details
      - verbatim quote from transcript
    - more details
      - verbatim quote from transcript
  - details
    - more details
      - verbatim quote from transcript
    - more details
      - verbatim quote from transcript
    - more details
      - verbatim quote from transcript
    - more details
- item 2 ...

Drawing: The kiddo uses the iPad a lot for reading, but maybe I can squeeze in some time to tinker around with different apps for drawing and animation.

Video editing: Maybe I can learn more about video editing or figure out what gear makes sense to add to my setup.

If you have other suggestions for low-cost experiments that might pay off in terms of making more useful blog posts or videos, I'd love to hear them!

At some point during the conversion of my blog from Wordpress to 11ty, I wanted to change my sketch links to use a custom shortcode instead of referring to the sketch in my old wp-uploads directory. Because Wordpress changed the filenames a little, I used the ID at the start of the filename. I forgot that many of my filenames from 2013 to 2015 just had the date without a uniquely identifying letter or number suffix, so many old references were ambiguous and my static site generator just linked to the first matching file. When I was listening to my old monthly reviews as part of my upcoming 10-year review, I noticed the repeated links. So I wrote these functions to help me find and replace markup of the form sketchLink "2013-10-06" with sketchLink "2013-10-06 Daily drawing - thinking on paper #drawing", replacing references to the same date with the next sketch in the list. I figured that would be enough to get the basic use case sorted out (usually a list of sketches in my monthly/weekly reviews), taking advantage of the my-list-sketches function I defined in my Emacs config.

(defun my-replace-duplicate-sketch-list-references ()
  (interactive)
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (let (seen)
    (while (re-search-forward "sketchLink \\\"\\([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]\\)\\\""
                              nil t)
      (if (assoc (match-string 1) seen)
          (setcdr (assoc (match-string 1) seen) (1+ (assoc-default (match-string 1) seen)))
        (setq seen (cons (cons (match-string 1) 1) seen))))
    (mapc (lambda (entry)
            (goto-char (point-min))
            (mapc (lambda (sketch)
                    (if (re-search-forward (format "sketchLink \\\"\\(%s\\)\\\""
                                                   (regexp-quote (car entry))) nil t)
                        (replace-match (save-match-data (file-name-sans-extension sketch))
                                       nil t nil 1)
                      (message "Skipping %s possible ref to %s"
                               (buffer-file-name)
                               sketch)))
                  (my-list-sketches (concat "^" (regexp-quote (car entry))) nil '("~/sync/sketches"))))
          seen)))

Sometimes I needed to delete the whole list and start again:

(defun my-insert-sketch-list-between (start-date end-date)
  (insert
   (mapconcat
    (lambda (f)
      (format "<li>%s sketchLink \"%s\" %s</li>\n"
              (concat "{" "%")  ; avoid confusing 11ty when I export this
              (file-name-sans-extension f)
              (concat "%" "}")))
    (sort (seq-filter
           (lambda (f) (and (string< f end-date) (not (string< f start-date))))
           (my-list-sketches nil nil '("~/sync/sketches")))
          'string<)
    "")))

I used find-grep-dired to search for sketchLink \"[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]\" and then I just used a keyboard macro to process each file.

Anyway, really old monthly reviews like this one for October 2013 should mostly make sense again. I could probably pull out the correct references from the Wordpress database backup, but what I've got is probably okay. I would probably have gotten much grumpier trying to do this without Emacs Lisp. Yay Emacs!