MyInfo Is My Choice

Posted by Amontillado
Jan 25, 2025 at 04:39 PM

Very timely discussion.

I’m writing a self help book on how to get out of debt. A thoroughly cheerless topic, but one I had to deal with. I’m now debt free with a credit rating as high as my golf handicap. Anyone who’s seen me golf should be quite impressed.

Anyway, there I was this week, 30,000 words or so into making as much comedy as possible out of tragedy, when I realized how far I’d strayed from my outline. Some good came from spontaneity. I decided to back propagate my prose into my outline, gaining a better start to finish plan than I started with.

The idea of a Zettelkasten came to mind. I went through my work paragraph by paragraph and created very short notes for each concept. I did this in Devonthink.

Next come notes for chapters. In these notes I don’t spell out details of what I’m going to write, I write a high level overview. Details come from transcluding appropriate idea notes.

For instance, if I talk about bad Tik Tok advice, I might transclude a note about velocity banking. In a later chapter I might go into more details where that same note would be transcluded. In either chapter, I can refine my velocity banking details. That updates my notes for both chapters.

A chapter note is used in side-by-side view, showing both the source and rendered Markdown. I’ve always thought the need for dual view to be a terrible limitation of Markdown. In this case it’s working.

The rendered view produces all the transclusions. The source view lets me follow transcluded links, optionally in new tabs. I get a workspace where I can edit the chapter notes, follow links to component topics, and see the aggregate product at the same time. Nice.

True rigor demands faith to the elegance of CRIMP methodology, so I fired up TheArchive, a modern revival of nvAlt. For any modern PKM enthusiast, TheArchive is too plain - but I found for this use, it matches Devonthink. Notion was workable, but not convenient. Obsidian was fine for this purpose without any community plugins.

My chapter notes were streamed from TheArchive to Marked for my compiled view, I can follow links (searches, actually) to component topics, and the magic of transclusion gave me the consistent notes across chapters I like.

I’m going back to Devonthink to finish this - but TheArchive was surprisingly effective and a whole lot cheaper.

Old isn’t bad or limited. In 1970, the Gougeon brothers built the trimaran Adagio. It’s known as the first sailboat built entirely without fasteners. It was devastatingly competitive in the world’s longest freshwater regatta, the Chicago to Mackinac race. At 30 years old in 2000, Adagio became the first sailboat to win both the Chicago to Mackinac and Bayview to Mackinac races, a feat she duplicated in 2016 at 46 years on the water, keeping pace with boats twice her waterline.

Age is a poor measure of efficiency.