In the past few years I’ve tried various different methods of organizing my work and thoughts. Bullet journals, e-ink tablets hooked up to cloud storage, &c. The motivating method for this project was Zettelkasten, which has likely seeped into the world’s conception of knowledge management via the hypertextual behemoth Wikipedia.
Criteria of the ideal personal knowledge system
- Standardized syntax and format in entries
- Support for links, backlinks, graph connections
- Extensibility for non-text features (i.e. videos, equations, images)
- Easily exportable to web
- Freedom in design
vimwiki was got the closest to this. It encouraged wiki-style webs of links, supported Markdown syntax, exported to HTML, and (most importantly) integrated well into my laptop’s environment; but on a terminal display I’m not free to inject renderings or pretty much anything that isn’t enriched UTF-8 text. I shall be free.
Building with Quartz
Quartz is a static site generator that has checked all these boxes thus far, mainly because its compatible with the Obsidian markdown system.