My Second Brain Stack
Needs
During my first Vipassana, one thing emerged into my mind over and over: I have to de-clutter my notes. I was taking notes randomly, writing short essays of fiction, lot of self reflection, tech notes, in different corners of cloud services and hard drives in different formats: some in txt files, some in Evernote, some in Google Keep. None qualified to my needs:
- be available offline
- easy scripting access
- local file based backup
- non-proprietary - no vendor lock in
- platform independent
I started developing a simple interface for my notes, one that could do simple formatting, github made me settle with Markdown, as it's pretty flexible and I can store them locally - meaning a simple Dropbox or Syncthing solves syncronization. This way I could have access to it even on my phone for free. I just need an editor that store some metadata.
Turns out the Simpsons did it already...
Digital Mari Kondo
A friend recommended Obsidian so I did not start reinventing the wheel again. The only downside so far I found is that it's not open-source, the rest is pretty appealing: an IDE for one's thoughts, heavily borrowing from VSCode style, extensible with plugins. I thought, if something is not fitting, I'll just develop it myself.
I realized while migrating all my knowledge base into one that what I need the most, is that it's one space, that has a proper organized structure, flexible enough, and makes it easy to find stuff in it. I have been writing a lot of self reflection (journaling) into the void, gather notes, to-do lists of the different patches of interest I had, never quite getting it right. I dove into Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) topics online, looking at Zettelkasten and looking into how other people do this. Discovering Building a Second Brain was a the game changer for me. A whole new world opened as I found chapter after chapter how he found and resolved the problems I was facing in my creative process.
I wanted everything in one place: my self reflection entries private, public blogs on separate topics, like tech, general knowledge (this blog), flying (still working on it), or any other project that may have a stream of curated info, articles or stories in the future.
For the blogging side I settled with a generic blog builder with JS, 11ty . It's extremely customizable have wide support, and easy to create minimalist sites in it with simple templates. All I had to do is a generic opinionated blog builder that can be dynamically extended with custom features as it develops.
I just needed a way to extract the publishable material from my vault, so I created Obsidian Bulk Exporter to fill in the missing link, serving as a bridge between my notes and publishing.
Tech Stack Sum
- ReadEra for books
- free
- highlight feature
- possible to export all the highlights into clipboard
- super minimalist and pretty, one of the best apps out there
- Obsidian Vault - I collect every note in this one place
- it's free for personal use but not open-source
- works with Markdown files
- extensible with custom plugins with a public API
- has a mobile app
- handles metadata with front-matter YAML
- Platform Independent: Linux/Android/Mac/Windows
- Syncthing as my personal cloud backup
- it's free and open source
- Platform Independent: Linux/Android/Mac/Windows
- handles multiple folders, I even use it for my music collections
- adaptive syncing settings
- no size limit, no folder amount limit, no device amount limit
- phone app can check out whole repo (Dropbox only does that on payed tier)
- and I had some old hard drives and raspberry pis as my cloud backup
- Obsidian Bulk Exporter
- Whatever I want to publish, I just add some metadata to it and boom
- supports multiple targets with multiple different settings
- can run static site generator scripts at the end of export
- 11ty Opinionated Blog Builder
- once exported from my vault, the blogs are re-built
- creates nice HTML blogs that I can host statically, customizable templates
- Digital Ocean Droplets
- I was thinking of hosting on Github, but for historic reasons and as there are some personal stuff, I found it better to host on my own vm.
- Simple nginx to serve static files.
- It also runs syncthing for my output folders
- it could also work out of my vault, but then I'd need a standalone version of my bulk exporter plugin, which would not be hard, but maybe not really necessary.
- costs: 6 USD/month for hosting my VM that I'd do anyways for my tech projects
Benefits:
- platform independent, runs really on anything
- 6 USD a month
- I save/update a note in Obsidian, it's published on a blog.