Frank Meeuwsen (Digging the Digital)Ik onderzoek weer hoe ik deze pagina’s beter kan gebruiken als een commonplace book, een plaats waar ik allerlei gedachten, ideeën en losse flodders kan plaatsen met minimale barrieres. Het is een rode draad in mijn blog-ontwikkeling en ik denk dat het een belangrijk element wordt op de IndieWebC...
[Rough English translation for convenience]
I am researching how I can better use these pages as a commonplace book , a place where I can place all kinds of thoughts, ideas and loose pieces with minimal barriers. It is a common thread in my blog development and I think it will be an important element at the IndieWebCamp barcamp for me.
While I do like the way that WordPress makes it easy for one to create link previews by simply putting a URL into the editor (as in your example), I’ve generally shied away from it as it relies on oEmbed and doesn’t necessarily put the actual text into your site. (Not all websites will provide this oEmbed functionality either.) I mention this because a lot of the benefit of having a commonplace is the ability to easily search it. If your post only has a title and a URL, without careful tagging it may be much harder to come back and discover what you were searching for later.
I’ve started an article on how I’m using my website as one, but still have a way to go before I finish it. A big portion of my workflow relies on the Post Kinds Plugin and its available bookmarklet functionality. There are also a lot of nice Micropub clients like Omnibear that making bookmarking things quick and easy too.
In the erstwhile, I ‘ll note that on my own site, I tag things relating to my own commonplace (thinking about and building it) as “commonplace book” and for examples of other peoples’ commonplaces, I usually use the plural tag “commonplace books“. These may also give you some ideas.
With respect to the Medium article which you linked, I’ve seen a recurring theme among bloggers (and writers in general) who indicate that they use their websites as “thought spaces”. Others may use similar or related phraseology (like “thinking out loud”) but this seems to be the most common in my experience. Toward that end, I’ve been bookmarking those articles that I’ve read with the tag “thought spaces“. Some of those notes and websites may also give you some ideas related to having and maintaining an online commonplace book.
a post by Chris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich)
Hi Chris, thanks for your thoughtful and kind reply. I appreciate you taking the time to point me in all the various directions on your site. I subscribed to the individual feeds of the tags, just to have specific notifications when something of interest pop ups on your radar on these topics. I think this is a great way to share and distribute knowledge and information on the open web, instead of just using hashtags and closed groups 😉
On the topic of the excellent Post Kinds plugin, I just found out it plays nice with the Yoast SEO plugin, which I use on my site as well. There was some sort of collision going on when both of them were activated, but this all seems to have been fixed. Which is great news for me, I love the Post Kinds and the possibilities of Omnibear, Quill and other Micropublish clients. A more granular way to write and post about specific topics is just excellent. Whether that’s chickens 😉 or in my case, craft beers. I might make my own Post Kind out of that one. Let’s see if I can populate it with my entries from the Untappd app!
Thanks again for your help in your reply and in all the other posts you’ve written for the Indieweb community.