Weekly Journal 170 - Digital Notes, Bookmarks, Logseq

Digital Notes

My attempts at building a personal knowledge base (PKB) haven’t been going as well as I hoped. I’ve made the mistake of trying to take comprehensive notes on everything I read, when I should be focused on identifying key insights and new ideas instead. Comprehensive notes are very labor intensive both to collect and to manage, and the more difficult it is to take notes, the less likely I am to do it.

I’m going to try a different tactic and focus on what truly resonates, and use that that identify key insights and new ideas from the media I consume. Those insights will then become notes. Hopefully this will reduce the overall friction around taking notes and help me to turn it into a regular practice.

Bookmarks

I’ve been trying to store my web bookmarks inside of my digital notes, and this really doesn’t work. I tend to bookmark the websites for computer tools and frameworks so that I can easily find them again. I’m not necessarily going to take notes on these things, so trying to keep the links in my notes just makes a mess. I’ve been using Pinboard for many years as my bookmark service, but it hasn’t received any meaningful updates or new features in several years. I’m starting to look at some other alternative services like Raindrop, Diigo, and Pocket. I’m also considering self-hosting something like LinkAce, if I can find a good way to make it available to my mobile devices without exposing it directly to the internet.

Logseq

The Logseq team announced they are working on a database-backed version of the tool. There is a forum post that goes into more detail about why they are doing this. The team has a longer-term vision of Logseq becoming a collaborative education tool, not just a digital notes application.

I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of switching to a binary database. The forum post claims they will be trying to enable bi-directional syncing between Markdown files and the database, but I suspect that is going to prove to be very difficult, and will ultimately abandoned. In time I expect Markdown files will be deprecated and replaced with this binary database. (Please note this is purely speculation and opinion on my part) For me, the primary draw of Logseq is that it is open source, and it stores my notes as Markdown text files. If it’s not going to work with text files, I might need to look for another tool again.