January 2nd, 2022

I’m good at keeping things in my head.

That’s a bad thing, because it makes me feel like I don’t have to write things down. In reality, I’m losing a lot of information. I find interesting things and think about stuff all the time, but almost immediately forget them.

I’m not actually that good at keeping things in my head. There’s so much information loss.

I got into the sourdough baking fad last year. I didn’t write anything down as I baked a bunch of different breads. I don’t remember anything; I effectively learned nothing from that experience.

I could link to articles and studies I’ve seen about this, but I can’t remember where they are.

Recently I’ve tried writing everything down. When I find something cool, I add a link to it. As I do stuff, I write down my thoughts. The difference is amazing; even in just a few weeks I have a huge amount of things to work with.

I keep finding myself wanting to share this information, but I didn’t know how. I could tweet it, but I don’t like that format. I’ve also reached the point of too many followers so I don’t feel like sharing every weird thought.

Twitter is too ephemeral. blogs are too permanent. I want something in-between.

Nobody reads blogs anymore. I don’t have time for writing blog posts anyway. They’re too formal, too long, and annoying to manage.

Down with blogs. I never want to write stupid metadata/frontmatter again just to post some thoughts.

down with formality

instead of a list of posts, this website is now a living graph of ideas

how does it work? I use Roam to write stuff down. All I have to do is write stuff down under a specific block. All of this is under “Thinking in public public” on my current daily note, so it shows up here

that’s it. that’s all I have to do. In fact, as I’m writing this it’s immediately showing up on my website

in the future I’ll expose a full graph on my ideas here with backlinks and everything

let’s get back to quirky websites full of weird ideas

Oh nice

I forgot that I hooked up discord to these public blocks so I can just write from discord too. this message is from my personal discord

oh this is using Remix btw. it’s the best of the best framework. finally something that embraces dynamic sites. this wouldn’t work without it; this site reads directly from my Roam graph. For speed, I just use Cloudflare to cache the contents for 5 minutes. static site generators are the worst (should write more thoughts about that, but this is already long)

to make this section all I had to do was create a new block titled “Remix” and tag it “public”. isn’t that cool?

(I’d link to Remix but this doesn’t support links yet)

I write a lot of todo lists. I’m not usually going to make them public, but might as well open this one. Here’s all the stuff I want to do for this site:

Run markdown on each block to display font styles, links, and images

Implement a parser for a few of Roam’s special blocks, like todo/done and videos

The parser also needs to handle the [[ ]] and # notation for referencing other pages. We should render them as links so you can jump to them

Also handle (( )) block references? We can already link to blocks, but hard to know if they are public

Query the back references to a page and render them

Implement a generic route handler that takes a route and queries the Roam graph for it. It would render all the public sections on that page (maybe allow entire pages to be marked public?)

“Posts” are just pages made public that are linked to from a public section in daily notes

An “all posts” page is just a query for pages marked as a post

Allow nested blocks (right now it ignores them)