Notes should be linked densely
I am lifting this idea directly from Andy.
Linking notes together forces us to comb through our mental model of the world. The knowledge garden that we build up is an externalized graph that maps our knowledge; it is a tool to help us remember things. We should leverage our externalized graph to help us find connections between ideas. In doing so, we reinforce the connections that live in our mind.
Building a great personal knowledge graph with Obsidian
Obsidian is a very unique product amongst personal knowledge management software. Over a recent two-week break that I took from work, I spent some time really digging into Obsidian and the broader idea of "personal knowledge graphs".
One particularly excellent example of how to build a personal knowledge graph is done by Andy Matuschak.
Some of my own notes on Obsidian:
How should notes be written to make an effective knowledge graph?
Paraphrasing Andy Matuschak:
And my own thoughts tacked on:
Now, what were the exact steps in building out the notes website?
Firstly, I used Obsidian to author the notes. The fact that it's a great IDE for linked thought helps a ton.
Secondly, I used an unpublished, install-from-source-only Python package, apparently developed by a Google engineer called Lettersmith to compile the markdown files into HTML files. I followed a baseline script by another GitHub user @kmcgillivray, who made obsidian-lettersmith, which provided a starter script I used as a base. I used a Jinja template to populate each page.
Thirdly, I re-visited Bootstrap docs to get styling done in a Bootstrap-idiomatic style. Previously, I was completely unaware of the styling utilities available. This meant I was maintaining very poorly-documented CSS hacks to get styling done right. By using the Bootstrap 4 utilities, I was able to compose together styling in a fashion that was much, much easier to maintain.
Fourthly, I wanted hover previews, which meant hacking the Jinja template with some custom JavaScript. Not pretty, and a bit verbose in the compiled pages, but it worked :).
By this point, I was happy enough with the sort-of-replicated Andy site.
I continue to use Obsidian to author the notes. As an IDE for linked thought, the graph view helps me see which notes are still isolated to one another; this gives me a great visual hint as to where I could add more links. I also continue to hack on the notes UI. The source code is in a private repository at this point, as I have plans to separate out the code for building the site from the notes source.