In yesterday’s post on Chris Aldrich’s overview of zettelkasten techniques, I asked about seeing the zettelkasten itself. He replied saying most of the content was in his Hypothesis account, and sent me a pointer to an entry. I read through a bunch of pages on zettelkasten stuff yesterday, and I am thinking of starting an open zettlekasten. With a nod to the Working Out Loud crowd, I am going to outline my initial plans in this post.

The item that Chris showed me was a picture and short caption describing what the picture meant. From this, I could see that an item/card in a zettelkasten could be just a reference to something with a short description. A type of information that I collect on a regular basis is links to posts/articles/things that I read in my feed reader. I have wanted to organize/classify all of these links, but have struggled to get started. I looked at Tom Critchlow’s wiki on his site, and saw a number of references to links where the link and an excerpt or summary was provided. I also saw an article on ZettelKasten.de about filtering flow from RSS feeds into a zettelkasten. From another ZettelKasten.de post, quotes and excerpts from sources are part of the chain of increasing value of knowledge within a zettlekasten system. Finally, Chris Aldrich, in an earlier post, gave his own advice for starting a commonplace book – “The general idea is to collect interesting passages, quotes, and ideas as you read”.

Based on this survey, I am going to experiment with collecting and organizing links within an OPML document and in Markdown files. Both of these methods of capture should be able to produce an organized output (OPML using XSLT style sheets, Markdown files using Hugo to render them (hopefully like Tom Critchlow’s wiki, even though he used Jekyll). For my five regular readers – let me know what you think!

PS – I noticed that yesterday I misspelled “zettelkasten” – sorry!