Manual

Page

The Main Things

While exploring the notes and essays, here are things to keep in mind:

  • For my essays, the ‘epistemic status’ refers to how certain I am about the content and conclusion drawn in it, in the form of a ratio that adds to 100. For example, 80:20 is 80% confidence that it’s true, 20% that it could be wrong. 50:50 would be a coin flip. Over time, this ratio might actually flip as my old thoughts are outdated, e.g 40:60 would be 60% certain that it’s actually not accurate.

  • Map of Concept type notes sometimes has an ‘Overview’. An overview is basically an abstract (a condensed summary), but lengthier and contains jargon. It’s OK if it doesn’t make a lot of sense, the rest of the writing will elaborate and explain it in detail.

  • Linked words (such as goals) often refer to a specific framing of the idea (for example ‘goals’ refer to a particular model of how they shape everything we interpret, feel, think, do, as well as our our absolute control and ability to shape them).

  • In terms of navigation, there’s three things:

    1. I sometimes link to a particular section of a note - this does not show up in the hover preview, and so it will not show you the relevant snippet.
    2. I selectively upload notes. If you’re curious about something that’s private, please feel free to message me! I’ll see if it’s ready to be shared.
    3. The bottom of notes have ‘Linked References’. They notes that are linked to the current note you’re on.

  • In many notes I might make reference to one concept multiple times, but I usually only link it the first time I mention it.

Below exists more detailed stuff.

Note Types

This describes the note types, listed in a roughly hierarchical manner.

MOC

MOC stands for Map of Concepts.

There are two types:

  1. ‘Book titles’ type (the name of the MOC is like a book title). The note itself links together multiple concepts + topics + evergreens. Holistic thought, ‘publishable’ as article.
  2. Topic type. A direct field such as stoicism.

Evergreens

The notion of Evergreen came from Andy Matuschak. Have a look here. Maggie Appleton also made a great visualization of it.

Type Prefixes

Inspired by Appleton’s page prefixes, I’ve created my own, which you might see crop up from time to time.

  • A - Articles
  • B - Books
  • C - Courses
  • D - Definitions
    • Definitions/Concepts that aren’t quite MOCs
  • E - Evergreens

Technical

This is built on Gatsby, and is my first project using it. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it so far!

I keep these ‘published’ notes in a folder that nested inside my Obsidian vault. That’s pushed to a public git which is then pulled as pages, parsed through various plugins and turned into pages.

Folder in Obsidian, public git, pulled from there as pages, parsed through custom plugin that turns double bracket links into proper ones.

With the gatsby-transformer-markdown-reference plugin by Dutour (who’s work I also based my own double brackets into links custom plugin off of), there are a few additional tweaks made to get the inbound/ outbound links properly working with Obsidian.

I also created a custom footnote parser that turns it into syntax that Tufte.css uses.

Here’s the list of plugins and other helpful resources I used:

Linked References

Manual

The Main Things

While exploring the notes and essays, here are things to keep in mind:

  • For my essays, the ‘epistemic status’ refers to how certain I am about the content and conclusion drawn in it, in the form of a ratio that adds to 100. For example, 80:20 is 80% confidence that it’s true, 20% that it could be wrong. 50:50 would be a coin flip. Over time, this ratio might actually flip as my old thoughts are outdated, e.g 40:60 would be 60% certain that it’s actually not accurate.

  • Map of Concept type notes sometimes has an ‘Overview’. An overview is basically an abstract (a condensed summary), but lengthier and contains jargon. It’s OK if it doesn’t make a lot of sense, the rest of the writing will elaborate and explain it in detail.

  • Linked words (such as goals) often refer to a specific framing of the idea (for example ‘goals’ refer to a particular model of how they shape everything we interpret, feel, think, do, as well as our our absolute control and ability to shape them).

  • In terms of navigation, there’s three things:

    1. I sometimes link to a particular section of a note - this does not show up in the hover preview, and so it will not show you the relevant snippet.
    2. I selectively upload notes. If you’re curious about something that’s private, please feel free to message me! I’ll see if it’s ready to be shared.
    3. The bottom of notes have ‘Linked References’. They notes that are linked to the current note you’re on.

  • In many notes I might make reference to one concept multiple times, but I usually only link it the first time I mention it.

Below exists more detailed stuff.

Note Types

This describes the note types, listed in a roughly hierarchical manner.

MOC

MOC stands for Map of Concepts.

There are two types:

  1. ‘Book titles’ type (the name of the MOC is like a book title). The note itself links together multiple concepts + topics + evergreens. Holistic thought, ‘publishable’ as article.
  2. Topic type. A direct field such as stoicism.

Evergreens

The notion of Evergreen came from Andy Matuschak. Have a look here. Maggie Appleton also made a great visualization of it.

Type Prefixes

Inspired by Appleton’s page prefixes, I’ve created my own, which you might see crop up from time to time.

  • A - Articles
  • B - Books
  • C - Courses
  • D - Definitions
    • Definitions/Concepts that aren’t quite MOCs
  • E - Evergreens

Technical

This is built on Gatsby, and is my first project using it. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it so far!

I keep these ‘published’ notes in a folder that nested inside my Obsidian vault. That’s pushed to a public git which is then pulled as pages, parsed through various plugins and turned into pages.

Folder in Obsidian, public git, pulled from there as pages, parsed through custom plugin that turns double bracket links into proper ones.

With the gatsby-transformer-markdown-reference plugin by Dutour (who’s work I also based my own double brackets into links custom plugin off of), there are a few additional tweaks made to get the inbound/ outbound links properly working with Obsidian.

I also created a custom footnote parser that turns it into syntax that Tufte.css uses.

Here’s the list of plugins and other helpful resources I used:

  • gatsby develop error: “gatsby-plugin-mdx” threw an error while running the onCreateNode lifecycle · Issue #25612 · gatsbyjs/gatsby
  • Tufte CSS
  • gatsby-source-git | Gatsby
  • gatsby-remark-external-links | Gatsby
  • gatsby-remark-autolink-headers | Gatsby
  • gatsby-plugin-catch-links | Gatsby
  • gatsby-plugin-breadcrumb | Gatsby
  • gatsby-remark-line-breaks | Gatsby
  • How to build a Markdown plugin for your Gatsby blog - LogRocket Blog
  • mathieudutour/gatsby-digital-garden: Create a digital garden with Gatsby
  • Bai Jamjuree - Google Fonts
  • Tippy.js - Tooltip, Popover, Dropdown, and Menu Library
  • https://maggieappleton.com/metatour
  • gatsby-plugin-stylus | Gatsby
  • css selectors - CSS select element which does not follow element - Stack Overflow
  • GraphQL Query Options Reference | Gatsby
  • Querying Data in Components using StaticQuery | Gatsby
  • CSS Selectors Reference
  • Customizing Markdown Components | Gatsby