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Annotated Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto EcoUmberto Eco (Secker & Warburg)
No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.
If you’re not sure how to start the first card in your zettelkasten, simply write this quote down on an index card, put a number in the corner, and go…

 

 

Tiago, I’ve started into an advanced copy of your forthcoming book and at the end of the introduction you have a footnote:

Other popular terms for such a system include Zettelkasten (meaning “slipbox” in German, coined by influential sociologist Niklas Luhmann), Memex (a word invented by American inventor Vannevar Bush), and digital garden (named by popular online creator Anne-Laure Le Cunff)

Please know that the zettelkasten and its traditions existed prior to Niklas Luhmann. He neither invented them nor coined their name. It’s a commonly repeated myth on the internet that he did and there’s ample evidence of their extensive use prior to his well known example. I’ve documented some brief history on Wikipedia to this effect should you need it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten

The earliest concept of a digital garden stems from Mark Bernstein’s essay Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas in 1998. This torch was picked up by academic Mike Caulfield in a 2015 keynote/article The Garden and The Stream: A Technopastoral.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s first mention of “digital garden” was on April 21, 2020

Which occurred just after Maggie Appleton’s mention on 2020-04-15

And several days after Justin Tadlock’s article on 2020-04-17 

Before this there was Joel Hooks by at least 2020-02-04 , though he had been thinking about it in late 2019.

He was predated by Tom Critchlow on 2018-10-18 who credits Mike Caulfield’s article from 2015-10-17 as an influence.

Archive.org has versions of the phrase going back into the early 2000’s: https://web.archive.org/web/*/%22digital%20garden%22

Hopefully you’re able to make the edits prior to publication, or at least in an available errata.

Acquired Remember It Now Tee (Field Notes)
The minute we saw Aaron's frantic, hand-lettered presentation of the Field Notes credo we knew just what to do. And here it is. In December, when Field Notes co-founder Aaron Draplin hijacked our site to sell pre-orders of his totally amazing Leap of Faith Edition 3-Packs, we went along with it. TBH, we’ve learned over the years that once Aaron gets fixed on an idea, there’s pretty much no stopping him. However, when he sent us the artwork for the Memo Books, we decided to do little hijacking of our own. The minute we saw his frantic, hand-lettered presentation of the Field Notes credo — “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now” — we knew just what to do. And here it is.
You might have gone down the rabbit hole on note taking practice nerdery when you’re getting note taking related t-shirts. Better than a mug I suppose…
In the bustle of life I missed it a week or so ago, so Happy 8th IndieWeb Birthday to BoffoSocko.com! I’ve been worrying about other things for the past year, so I’ve completely missed the 7 year itch effect, though perhaps improving my PASTA workflow to Obsidian might have been the dalliance?

I think the biggest thing I’ve added to my website this past year was the ability to post to it with pen and paper. I wonder what sort of functionality the 8th year will bring? Pottery is apparently the “traditional gift”, so perhaps posting via clay with cuneiform as someone joked might actually come to fruition? I’m off to fire up the kiln…

@abidnev@mastodon.social I like the look of https://fedipress.com/ and where it’s going. Your tutorial is excellent, but omits one small piece of useful architecture for discovery. You might consider adding the NodeInfo plugin to your WordPress/Fediverse toolbelt.

One of its benefits is to help WordPress sites show up in Fediverse databases like https://the-federation.info/wordpress, which should also give you a broader listing of the (currently 405 nodes with 9273 users) WordPress instances in the Fediverse for advertising on your site.

Good luck!

While the new community members section of the IndieWeb newsletter is just a tiny subset of people who are joining the IndieWeb movement by actively adding themselves to the wiki, it’s been encouraging to see expanding growth both here and in the broader web (even Tumblr) and Fediverse space since Musk announced the acquisition of Twitter.

Here’s to more positive growth to a healthier and happier online social experience.

Replied to a tweet by Moritz WallawitschMoritz Wallawitsch (Twitter)
I’ve created a Zotero group for Tools of Thought that many are beginning to contribute to. It’s got lots of material and history that is afield from the more common computer-centric resources you’ve listed thus far. https://www.zotero.org/groups/4676190/tools_for_thought
Playing around with Kevin Marks‘ changes to the base Tumblr theme which has added some microformats. It’s looking pretty good in most of the parsers I’ve tested. Here’s a good visual one: https://monocle.p3k.io/preview?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchrisaldrich.tumblr.com.

This makes me want to use and syndicate to it more often.

Replied to a tweet by Ed HeilEd Heil (Twitter)
The whole idea behind IndieWeb is that you can use your website to own all your content on a domain you own/control. You’ve got a site with webmentions set up, so we could be having this whole conversation from site to site. Instead, I’m choosing to syndicate/POSSE my replies from my site(s) to Twitter, to meet you where you’re currently at. Integrating my site with Brid.gy allows me to get your responses from Twitter back to my website. Here’s some more on threaded conversations between WordPress and Twitter that may help frame what you’re attempting. (It also includes a link of WordPress to WordPress or other site conversations as well.)
I’ve been following “Welsh Twitter” off and on, but TIL that there’s a Welsh Mastodon: Tŵt Cymru at https://toot.wales/about.

Bore da. Chris dw i. Dw i’n dysgu Cymraeg. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

I’ll have to figure out how to automate POSSE of my Welsh-related posts to my new account: https://toot.wales/@chrisaldrich. Until then it’s manual until it hurts.

But first, figuring out how to work this into my practice…

Replied to a thread by Mia (not her best work) and Zach Leatherman (Twitter)
I always circle back to the Lost Infrastructure chart here https://indieweb.org/lost_infrastructure and wonder:

  • in which boxes can the technology requirements be simplified for publishers and maintainers of individual websites but still allow for the broadest inter-operation?
  • which axes are missing?
  • which boxes need to be expanded with technology for better plurality?
Replied to As I continue reading and sometimes re-posting ... by Jeremy CherfasJeremy Cherfas (Jeremy Cherfas)
As I continue reading and sometimes re-posting things written on this day, I've decided to do one more thing at the end of a session: go to a random site in the IndieWeb WebRing. Today, I found something that resonates down the years: how to organise the content of a weblog.
These are fascinating questions, though looking at them from various perspectives and imagined audiences over time scales makes them more intriguing. 

Most often we privilege the chronological time order because that’s how we ourselves live them, write them, and how much of our audience experiences them.

But consider looking at someone’s note collections or zettelkasten after they’re gone? One wouldn’t necessarily read them in physical order or even attempt to recreate them into time-based order. Instead they’d find an interesting topical heading, delve in and start following links around.

I’ve been thinking about this idea of “card index (or zettelkasten) as autobiography” for a bit now, though I’m yet to come to any final conclusions. (References and examples see also: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=%22card+index+as+autobiography%22). 

I’ve also been looking at Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project which is based on a chunk of his (unfinished) zettelkasten notes which editors have gone through and published as books. There were many paths an editor could have taken to write such a book, and many of them that Benjamin himself may not have taken, but there it is at the end of the day, a book ostensibly similar to what Benjamin would have written because there it is in his own writing in his card index.

After his death, editors excerpted 330 index cards of Roland Barthes’ collection of 12,000+ about his reactions to the passing of his mother and published them in book form as a perceived “diary”. What if someone were to do this with your Tweets or status updates after your death?

Does this perspective change your ideas on time ordering, taxonomies, etc. and how people will think about what we wrote? 

I’ll come back perhaps after I’ve read Barthes’ The Death of the Author…

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