Back to Org-roam (from Denote)
Using both Org-roam and Denote for my notes is not sustainable. I had to make a call one way or the other.
I went with Org-roam.
This is a bit disappointing because I prefer the philosophy of Denote. I like that Denote is agnostic about file types (I can mix and match Markdown and Org-mode files, for example). I like that it forces a consistent file naming scheme. I like that it doesn’t depend on Org-mode features or any other complex dependencies. I like that it doesn’t try to do too much, but is easily extensible. Plus, I’m not trying to build some sort of zettelkasten or anything, so simple is preferable.
But, I keep finding things in Org-roam that I “need”. I use aliases all the time. I like to use several tags on a file, but don’t want them all in the file name. I like the full-featured daily notes functions. I like the ability to extract a heading out to a new roam file. Or I can use org-roam-refile to move a heading to another file in the Org-roam directory. I’m sure I could find ways to handle some of these things in Denote, but with Org-roam I get them out of the box.
What I really like in Org-roam, and have come to rely on, is the ability to have individual Org headings become their own independent roam nodes. For a while, I thought this added unnecessary complexity, but it turns out to be super useful. For example, I have a books.org file, with each book as its own heading. (See Book logging in Emacs). Since moving this file into Org-roam, I’ve turned each book’s heading into its own node, making it easier to search for a book or to link between the book and its author note or a concept note. And I can still create summary tables within the books.org file.
Then there’s the Graph. I make fun of the Graph because it really is mostly useless, but dammit it’s fun to poke around in.
Part of my org-roam graph
Add Org-roam’s larger ecosystem to the above list, and the decision to keep my notes in Org-roam becomes hard to argue with. I’m slowly moving my Denote notes back into Org-roam and fixing links, etc.
I don’t know why I’m so sentimental about Denote. Not using it makes me a little sad. Prot is brilliant and I like the way he thinks. Denote is a terrific, smart, simple Emacs package, but right now Org-roam makes more sense for my notes.
Renumbering my index cards
When I started building a new index card note box, I followed Scott Schepard’s lead and used the Wikipedia Academic Disciplines as the overarching structure. I’ve come to dislike that system. It’s too dependent on hierarchy, and one I don’t really follow. So, this morning, when trying to install a new note about Libertarianism (topical!), I became frustrated and renumbered everything.
I’m now using a simpler, more Luhmann-like card numbering system. (Some would call it “Folgezettel”, but I’ll stick with “numbering system”).
Each new card gets a number, with the first being 1.1. If a subsequent idea plays directly off the first, it gets 1.1a. If it’s on the same general topic, but unrelated to the first, it gets 1.2. The next completely unrelated idea gets 2.1, etc. If I stick to this, I’ll end up with numbers like 134.3a1b and that’s just fine because I know what’s nearby and I always have the index to fall back on.
Bob Doto does a nice job of explaining all this in How to Use Folgezettel in Your Zettelkasten.
Now I don’t need to worry whether “Libertarianism” falls under “Political Science” or “Mythology”. I can just file it somewhere behind my existing thread on, say, “Selfishness”.
Scanography
After watching “Last Stop Coney Island” and learning that Harold Feinstein used a scanner to make One Hundred Flowers, I was inspired, so I scanned a Pringle.
Pringle, “photographed” using a flatbed scanner
Viewing Caddy logs by date in GoAccess
UPDATE: I’ve had trouble getting GoAccess to parse the logs consistently after changing the date format.
I’ve been using GoAccess on the VPS running my static sites for keeping an eye on web server access logs. It works great and requires no tracking scripts. I run a cron job every five minutes to process my site logs and generate an HTML report. This is fine, but GoAccess always processes the entire log file and offers no way to filter the results. Sometimes I only want to see stats for, say, today or for the past week.
To do this, I run GoAccess on only a subset of the log file using the command line directly on the server. The GoAccess man page includes some examples using sed so that’s where I started. The first problem I ran into was that Caddy’s log files use json by default rather than the trusty old common or combined formats. The default log format uses a UNIX timestamp for dates, so the first thing to do was to change the format to iso8601 in Caddy’s configuration, like so…
daily.baty.net {
log {
output file /home/jbaty/logs/caddy/daily.baty.net.log
format json {
time_format iso8601
}
}
}Now I can parse the logs based on the date using sed:
#!/bin/sh
sed -n '/'$(date '+%Y\/%m\/%d' -d 'today')'/,$ p' logs/caddy/daily.baty.net.log | goaccess -a --unknowns-as-crawlers --ignore-crawlers -Now when I run ./stats-today on the server, I get something like this:
GoAccess in a terminal on the server
Check me out with my 5 whole visitors so far this morning! 😆
The Spark File
Ten years ago, Steven Johnson wrote The Spark File, in which he describes his process for keeping track of hunches, ideas, etc. in a single text file.
I, of course, thought this was a great idea and immediately started keeping my own spark file. It began in 2012 and I was reasonably consistent with it until 2016. After that, there was a lull, but it picked up again for a short time in 2021, after which I sort of forgot about it.
I ran into the file today and reviewing it has been quite a trip. The short version is that I’ve only done a few of the things I’d written down. This is fine since many of them are things I’m either no longer interested in or were too ambitious anyway. I have, since I last checked, completed a few of them. Crossing them off the list was fun. There are others that are still good ideas and that I may pursue.
Since the file is an org-mode file, I’ve added a capture template to my Emacs config that lets me quickly capture new entries. Now I just need some hunches or ideas to capture.
An Arc browser boost for a better Twitter experience
There are still a few people that I want to hear from that have not (yet) left Twitter, so I visit Twitter maybe once a day. Andy Bell posted the following “Boost” for the Arc browser:
[aria-label="Trending"],
[aria-label="Search and explore"],
[aria-label="Twitter Blue"],
[data-testid="DMDrawerHeader"],
[href*="promote"] {
display: none !important;
}It takes about 10 seconds to add new boosts like the above.
I dislike Twitter, but I love Arc. Now Twitter doesn’t suck as much.
A fix for backlink display with Org-roam and Doom Emacs
I’ve been tracking an issue with the way backlinks are displayed that affects my use of Org-roam. Someone (hwiorn) finally discovered a workaround when using Doom Emacs: delete the compiled version of org-roam-utils. Like this:
rm .config/emacs/.local/straight/build-*/org-roam/org-roam-utils.elcNow my links show up correctly. Finally! I’ll probably need to delete the file every time I sync or update but I don’t care as long as there’s a fix. It was driving me nuts.
UPDATE: And a few hours later, it was fixed for good in this commit.
Using jAlbum for photo galleries
The jAlbum UI
I’ve been a Flickr user since 2004 and a SmugMug user for nearly as long. For some reason, I prefer looking at my photos via online galleries rather than, say, my Photos library, and both Flickr and SmugMug have helped me do that.
I’ve also kept standalone static web galleries for the odd side project, such as a memorial to my dog Leeloo. Recently, I’ve been creating more of these, so I started looking for easier or better ways of generating static web galleries from a selection of photos. There are what feels like a thousand options. Everything from giant GUI apps to the nerdiest little command line utilities.
After looking around a bit, I’ve settled on jAlbum. I didn’t expect to like it. After all, it’s from that time (2004) when software was named so that everyone knew what it was written in. And I developed an allergy to Java not long after that. Go figure!
jAlbum is surprisingly robust and capable, while still being simple to use. The defaults are mostly fine, but it lets me tweak the dickens out of it, should I want to.
I’ve only spent the morning with it, but I have created some initial galleries at static.baty.net/photos. I think it already looks fine, and I haven’t even begun to tweak it.
jAlbum has built-in (S)FTP capability for automating the process of getting everything out to my server, but it doesn’t support ssh keys so I can’t use that. I’m instead using rsync via a tiny Makefile, so all I need to do is type make and the changes are deployed.
Everything is here now
UPDATE a better title would now be “Everything was here now”, as the blog is now running on Blot.im.
I’m perfectly aware that the following may only be true for like 18 hours, but…
I’m only posting here on Baty.net using WordPress. No daily site, no wiki. Everything I write is going here. I dislike using WordPress, but it has everything I need. And I don’t honestly spend that much time actually writing. It’s fine.
My daily journal posts are excluded from the home page, but are included in the RSS feed or directly via baty.net/journal (that will redirect to /topics/journal/ for now). I would like to include today’s journal post on the home page, but I don’t know enough about WordPress to make that happen yet.
I was so sick of thinking about Tinderbox vs Hugo vs Eleventy vs TiddlyWiki for my daily notes this morning that I routed around all of them and landed here. Let’s see if it sticks.
Narrator: “It didn’t”