Looking for method of curating notes and thoughts digitally.

Found https://www.vegantechnomad.com/ and has a notion template that organises thoughts and processes somewhat effectively, but it was 20USD for the template, and I didn’t feel Notion is a great service as they sell user data and information: https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/sjtlf8/more_people_should_pay_attention_to_the_privacy/

I considered making a WordPress site with my already created site using the “Adaptive Colors” template from liquid-themes called Hub https://themeforest.net/item/hub-html-responsive-multipurpose-template/46765901 (12USD/site) and they also have a WordPress theme (59USD/site) https://themeforest.net/item/hub-responsive-multipurpose-wordpress-theme/31569152 however, the editing and publishing is too rigid perhaps for what I want to do. This is a second-tier solution. Liquid-themes also produces AI Hub WordPress Theme (39USD/site): https://themeforest.net/item/ai-hub-startup-technology-wordpress-theme/47473638

Yet again went to Obsidian because people are crazy about it in the tech world. Was never really a fan of markdown because the base language forgot about needed document tools but it is extended.

Viewed Obsidian website and found Obsidian Sync and Obsidian Publish. Sync is for saving notes to the Obsidian cloud, and Obsidian Publish is for publishing notes.

Obsidian Sync is free for personal use, and commercial use is 50USD/Year. Not overbearing price. Good utility to sync between mobile apps and desktop app.

Obsidian Publish turns it into a website like a “digital garden” however it is 8USD/month and wow that’s not a good deal, especially with the size restriction, so when you like to use images, it cuts through like a knife. An example offered on https://obsidian.md/publish is https://publish.obsidian.md/myquantumwell

Google searched for Obsidian Publish alternatives, and found the following:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/u7r2a5/a_free_open_source_obsidian_publish_alternative/ → Quartz: https://github.com/jackyzha0/quartz and https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/ “quartz v4 is a complete rewrite in ReactJS based on difficulties with Hugo as backend. Curious how they overlap.” Found https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/features/Obsidian-compatibility and is mostly compatible with Obsidian. Also found OxHugo compatibility: “org-roam is a plain-text personal knowledge management system for emacs. ox-hugo is org exporter backend that exports org-mode files to Hugo compatible Markdown.

Because the Markdown generated by ox-hugo is not pure Markdown but Hugo specific, we need to transform it to fit into Quartz. This is done by the OxHugoFlavoredMarkdown  plugin. Even though this plugin was written with ox-hugo in mind, it should work for any Hugo specific Markdown.” → Found FlowerShow https://flowershow.app/ “Flowershow is an open-source tool for easily converting your markdown files into an elegant website. It’s built on a standard, modern web stack React, Next.js, and Tailwind and shipped with a basic default theme to get you started with just a few clicks.” Also available as an Obsidian plugin. Flowershow cloud is 5USD/month. → MindStone https://mindstone.tuancao.me/ a free and open-source alternative to Obsidian Publish, and is buggy and has to redraw the tree on each usage. Github: https://github.com/TuanManhCao/digital-garden → Publishkit https://publishkit.dev/ looks nice and has a plugin for Obsidian: https://github.com/publishkit/obsidian

Self-hosted question: “Can Obsidian Publish be used for a private, self-hosted site? What are the “contribute” features of Publish?” https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/10nwnri/can_obsidian_publish_be_used_for_a_private/ Short answer: Cannot be self-hosted.

On Reddit: “I built a free alternative to Obsidian Publish (no programming knowledge required)“

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/10a3421/i_built_a_free_alternative_to_obsidian_publish_no/

→ Interesting notes website with good articles: https://brandonkboswell.com/ discussion of reMarkable 2/3beta and other eInk solutions as well as

On Reddit: Quartz v4: a free Obsidian Publish alternative

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/15wryj2/quartz_v4_a_free_obsidian_publish_alternative/

Jacky Zhao (jackyzha0)‘s good post on Networking Thought and digital gardening: https://jzhao.xyz/posts/networked-thought Sponsor Jacky Zhao on GitHub: https://github.com/sponsors/jackyzha0 Discord server https://discord.gg/cRFFHYye7t

giscus discussions powered by GitHub Discussions https://giscus.app/

editor.do https://editor.do/ awesome editor but too expensive

Google search: “post obsidian notes to cloudflare pages”

Found Reddit: “Here is how I finally published my Obsidian Vault for free” Digital Garden (Sharaf’s Horizon) https://sharaf.cc/obsidian/plugins/digital-garden/ and how it was published on Cloudflare Pages https://sharaf.cc/10-19-technical-skills/10-web-development/10-01-hosting/cloudflare-pages/ with benefits outlined as free, unlimited seats, preview control, web analytics, fast, scalable, secure, and auto updates with latest web standards such as HTTP3 and has SSL out of the box. Can use a custom domain as well. Limitations: 20000 files, 25MB, 500 deployments/month. More info on limits: https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/limits/ Also available is Github Pages: https://sharaf.cc/10-19-technical-skills/10-web-development/10-01-hosting/git-hub-pages/

Reddit Post: “Does there exist self-hosting solutions?” https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/kw0l91/does_there_exist_selfhosting_solutions/

→ Obsidian Export: https://github.com/zoni/obsidian-export → SyncThing: https://syncthing.net/ → Self-hosted Obsidian LiveSync: https://github.com/vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync → Obsidian plugin to backup your Obsidian.md vault with git: https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git → Went down an “anti-github” rabbit hole and found: https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/ → mambocab

Maggie Appleton’s repo of digital gardens and gardening resources could be of help. There are some extensions to static site generators that might do the trick.

To others’ points, once the thing is built you can use GitHub Pages or anything else that serves static sites. ⇒ Wow. Very impressive (best) digital garden by Maggie Appleton, found: https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners and https://maggieappleton.com/

Gardening Tools

Building a Public Garden

• Roam Research - A personal notes system for interconnected thought
  • See the following resources for converting your private garden in Roam to a public garden:
    • Roam Garden a service that does all the setup for you based on JSON export
    • Gatsby Theme Garden Gatsby theme that supports using Roam as a source
    • Roam-to-Garden Jekyll based converter for your Roam Data
• Obsidian - a Roam-like knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files. Also allows you to publish selections of your graph to the open web.
• TiddlyWiki - A no-code personal wiki system
  • Stroll a TiddlyWiki plugin with bi-directional links and other Roam-like features
  • TiddlyMap - a mind-map plugin that shows visualizations for TiddlyWiki.
• Gitbook
• React-Notion - allows you to publish a React-based website sources from your Notion notes - “Notion as a CMS”
• Gatsby Brain Theme - Roam-like bidirectional links in Gatsby.js
• Gatsby Andy Theme
• Gatsby Theme Garden - A set of tools to build a digital garden with Gatsby.js. Pull data from Roam Research or markdown.
• Simply Jekyll - A Jekyll theme with bidirectional links, sidenotes, and transclusion
• Digital Garden Jekyll Template - A simple, clean jekyll template with bi-directional links
• Jekyll-Bonsai - A modern jekyll theme for semantically inclined digital gardeners.
• Jekyll Garden - Clean Jekyll theme supporting bidirectional links.
• Eleventy Garden - A minimal template with backlinks, built in Eleventy
• Foam - Roam-like personal note management and publishing system built inside VSCode
• Foamy NextJS - Basic Foam + NextJS with MDX starter for building a digital garden
• Dendron - A structured note taking tool that merges the freedom of Roam-like linking with the order hierarchical organization
• Hyperdraft - Turns plain markdown notes into a website as you write. Easy to setup and doesn’t require builds or deploys.
• Neuron - Managing and publishing system for plain-text Zettelkasten-style notes.
• Innos Notes – Features include parallel pages, content blocks, and knowledge graph visualisations.
• Trilium Notes - A hierarchical note taking application with focus on building large personal knowledge bases.
• Quartz - Publish your Obsidian or Roam digital garden to the web for free. Includes full-text search, graph visualization, and backlinks.

Building a Private Garden

• Bangle.io - A simple, markdown-based notetaking app that runs locally on your machine.
• Org Roam - non-hierarchical note-taking with org-mode in emacs
• TheBrain - A tool for taking interconnected notes with an interactive graph.
• The Archive - A fast plain text Markdown note-taking app with Zettelkasten features like linking and tagging.

Extra Gardening Tools

• Webmentions - About the Webmentions system

  • Webmention.io - A service to add Webmentions to your Garden

• Hypothesis - A layer of social meta commentary

• mkdocs-newsletter - An add-on to the MKdocs platform that generates a newsletter logging which pages have changed

How-To’s and Tutorials

• How to build a digital garden with TiddlyWiki by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

• Own Your Second Brain: Set Up org-roam on Your Own Machine by Ian Jones

• Building a Digital Garden by Tom Critchlow

• Webmentions - Joining the IndieWeb with Svelte by Shawn Wang

• How to plant a Garden a video walkthrough for converting your RoamResearch DB into a public garden by Vlad Sitalo

• Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks by Maggie Appleton

Theory, Philosophy, and Navel-Gazing

• The Garden and the Stream: A Techno pastoral by Mike Caulfield – the original source of the concept of Digital Gardening

• Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens by Tom Critchlow

• How the Blog Broke the Web by Amy Hoy

• My blog is a digital garden, not a blog by Joel Hooks

• You and your mind garden by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

• Digital Garden Terms of Service by Shawn Wang

• What is a digital garden? by Chris Biscardi

• The Garden and the Stream: An IndieWeb Pop-up Session

• The Swale: Weaving between Garden and Stream by Will Stedden

• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton

Common Ground: Zettelkasten, Knowledge Graphs, Wikis, and Related Concepts

• Zettelkasten: knowledge and info management

• The Zettelkasten Method by Abram Demski

• A web of wikis by Neil Mather

• Bliki tooling by Neil Mather

• Hack Your Life With A Private Wiki Notebook, Getting Things Done, And Other Systems by Bill Seitz

• As We May Think by Vannevar Bush (The Atlantic, 1945)

Digital Garden Directory

⭐️ = Featured; unique and exceptional examples

Other digital garden compilations:

• Nikita’s compilation
• Richard Litt’s compilation
• KasperZutterman’s compilation
• Best-of Digital Gardens

Maggie Appleton is an amazing UI/UX professional, and so much information:

Mega digital gardening resources: https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners In the stack for Maggie’s website:

• uses Vercel https://vercel.com/pricing to host Next.js with a good free tier.
• https://webmention.io/
• Uses a mix of “Canela” and “Lato” font families, it looks amazing. Canela: https://type.today/en/canela_deck
• Explanation of the stack: https://maggieappleton.com/colophon
• Uses React: https://reactjs.org/, Style components: https://styled-components.com/, using markdown extended: https://github.com/mdx-js/mdx and animations: https://www.framer.com/motion/ all hosted on Vercel: https://vercel.com/. Fluid type scale for calculations on font sizes https://utopia.fyi/blog/designing-with-fluid-type-scales by Utopia https://utopia.fyi/

Website is organised as: The Garden >

• Essays: “Opinionated, longform narrative writing with an agenda.”
• Notes: “Loose, unopinionated notes on things I don’t entirely understand yet.”
• Pattern Catalogue: “A catalogue of design patterns gathered from my own observations and research.”
• Library: “Books I’ve read that significantly influenced how I see the world.”
• Antilibrary: “Books I like the idea of having read.” Now: “A sporadically updated log of what I’m reading, exploring, and thinking about” About: “Designer, anthropologist, and mediocre developer.” Colophon: “A colophon is a nobby designer word for ‘how this site was made‘“

Typography:

“Headers are set in Canela Display  and body copy is set in  Canela Text , both from  Commercial Type. I love its semi-serifs and classical feel. Supporting sans-serif type is set in  Lato. I use a fluid type scale developed by Utopia, which uses some wild CSS calculations to continuously adjust the font size relative to your browser’s width.”

⇒ Pure awesome, is exactly what I want.

Writing and Editing Content

My CMS is just a bunch of flat files and folders. When I edit content on here I’m just typing text and syntax into MDX and JS files in VS Code. There’s no fancy pipeline shuttling content directly from my personal knowledge management database (eg. Roam or Tana). All my ideas start and marinate in my Tana, but I wait for them to mature a bit before they move over to this garden.

I know other people prefer setups where they can click one button and push content from personal notes to the web. I personally like having more control over how the material is displayed and laid out. Working directly in the native medium of the web – HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – gives me fine-grained control. It allows me to play with typography, illustrations, graphic design, videos, animations, and interactive elements that pure text pipelines can’t support. Text isn’t the only way to represent ideas.

-⇒ Found more: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/12zm2ba/selfhosted_obsidian_alternative/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/14aj042/any_selfhosted_alternative_to_obsidian_andor/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/16e5jek/best_way_to_selfhost_obsidian_publish/

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