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The author needs to make up his mind: in one place he says that there is no "parent leaf, or child leaf", and then two sentences later says "The ID on each leaf

The author needs to make up his mind: in one place he says that there is no "parent leaf, or child leaf", and then two sentences later says "The ID on each leaf refers to it position on a branch of a tree." He's just playing word games. Either you're proposing a hierarchical system, or you're not. What he seems to be advocating is a taxonomy where each card can link to another card by ID, whilst taking a long time saying it. I tried out zkn a few weeks ago for my programming notes. It was kinda OK, but it didn't preserve line breaks when I pasted in code, not even between the zettels. So I decided to see if I could just use plain text files. The files are numbered sequentially. The first file is 01-index.md. The second one is 02-spi-irq.md. I can see straight away that the file beginning 02 tells me how to do SPI transfers using interrupts. The index file is for, well, indexing. It only has 1 entry at the moment: duty cycle, 4 So I know that stuff relating to duty cycles in in card 4. It seems a reasonable system. I also keep a written notebook. I'll keep entries in them, which are typically 1 page long, but could be longer. Each entry has a title, which I list at the back of the book as a table of contents. The big disadvantage of a TOC is that the contents are in no particular order, and scanning through them is a pain. Inevitably one's eyes glaze over and the TOC becomes a mist. The solution? Indexing! The index is now my first port of call. I can cross-reference however I please. A tip I would add is to not just write page numbers, but add in additional descriptions. Here is my section on Pinouts: Pinouts stm32 208 pico 224 pi 196 stm8 206 mcp4921 320 So I can find pinout diagrams for my microcontrollers easily. Otherwise they're just mystery numbers, and not much help. The disadvantage with this system is that one must guess how much space a letter of the alphabet will take. Things won't be in strict alphabetical order, either, as you don't know in advance what the entries would be. I guess one could always keep a computer file for an index. Or perhaps forego an index and keep a TOC which one can grep. The index. That much overlooked invention.

kmill 5y ago
The article is all over the place, but I think I might be able to summarize: - ZK involves organizing your cards in a tree - This tree is not a taxonomy. It merely reflects the way in which the information was consumed or the ideas were created. - It is better to link cards together with ID numbers rather than by giving cards names and using wikilinks. Wikilinks imply some amount of taxonomic organization of the cards. (Remember, naming things is one of the two difficult things in CS, along with cache invalidation and off-by-one errors.) - There shouldn't be a master table of contents that one organizes. This gives an implied taxonomic organization of the cards. One idea from Memexes and early hypertext systems are "trails", which are special entries that include links to other cards. They're sort of special-purpose tables of contents into the hypertext archive. These are important for navigation, and they don't require that the entire archive be taxonomically organized. Indexing is a good idea. It's basically a curated full text search. > The index. That much overlooked invention. I don't know if I'm just misremembering Cat's Cradle as a work of non-fiction, but I think I heard that Vonnegut sat next to an indexer on an airplane once, and they convinced him of the value of indexing. I thought I remember there being an index at the end of Cat's Cradle, but I can't find my copy to check.

kmill 5y ago

The article is all over the place, but I think I might be able to summarize: - ZK involves organizing your cards in a tree - This tree is not a taxonomy. It merely reflects the way in which the information was consumed or the ideas were created. - It is better to link cards together with ID numbers rather than by giving cards names and using wikilinks. Wikilinks imply some amount of taxonomic organization of the cards. (Remember, naming things is one of the two difficult things in CS, along with cache invalidation and off-by-one errors.) - There shouldn't be a master table of contents that one organizes. This gives an implied taxonomic organization of the cards. One idea from Memexes and early hypertext systems are "trails", which are special entries that include links to other cards. They're sort of special-purpose tables of contents into the hypertext archive. These are important for navigation, and they don't require that the entire archive be taxonomically organized. Indexing is a good idea. It's basically a curated full text search. > The index. That much overlooked invention. I don't know if I'm just misremembering Cat's Cradle as a work of non-fiction, but I think I heard that Vonnegut sat next to an indexer on an airplane once, and they convinced him of the value of indexing. I thought I remember there being an index at the end of Cat's Cradle, but I can't find my copy to check.