I published another website for my public notes. As I take more and more notes, I want a place to review and easily memorize them. I previously tried Evernote, Hackmd.io, Notion, Obsidian, and some others I don’t remember.
Since I use Emacs for typing and the browser for viewing, I don’t want a third window that distracts me. So I started to try different Emacs plugins. I want an easy-managing workflow of my knowledge base and free access to read from anywhere.
Org-roam
Org-roam is built on org-mode with the Roam philosophy of building your second brain and encouraging creative writing. A guy’s org-roam practice is a nice post, and here is his Emacs config.
The “Roam” connects all the dots, including thought pieces, references, previous notes, and more. It might be useful for academic writing, which needs a lot of references and to break down opinions. However, I only used it for about a week and switched back to just org-mode. I am more comfortable managing files on myself but not letting the program create new files without thinking.
Ox-hugo
I finally built another site Study and put my notes on it. Unlike my blog site impl.dev, it uses ox-hugo to convert content from .org files to .md files. Moreover, it allows you to manage just one single .org file for multiple .md files. A powerful feature. With these .md files, Hugo generates .html pages for you.
Org-mode can also publish to .html directly, but I am not enthusiastic about dealing with CSS or any themes. Hugo’s massive selection of themes makes things much easier.
Managing Notes
All in all, there is not a tool that fits all. Tools themselves don’t solve problems for human beings. They are not supposed to automatically do everything for us.
Our knowledge base is deliberately built by ourselves but not tools. The way we organize files, folders and their contents reflects the organization of our minds and thoughts. We can’t expect to make a well-organized wiki site without clearly understanding our own management style. Other than that, tools can help with accelerating our workflows to achieve efficiency.
There are many posts about how to manage notes. I am still learning, and I put some of my reading notes here.