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What the heck is with that crazy page design? The sliding panels and stuff. I'll see if I can figure out how to read it. That guy must do an awful lot of wor

What the heck is with that crazy page design? The sliding panels and stuff. I'll see if I can figure out how to read it. That guy must do an awful lot of work keeping them organized and publicly presentable. His basic point is fine, "professional" note taking systems generally seem silly. I have found it worthwhile to keep a bunch of org mode files about stuff I get interested in. They become progressively more useful as search engines get worse: if I find an interesting page and make a mental note of it, I probably won't be able to relocate it by remembering a few keywords as was formerly possible. So now I make a point of saving the link and ideally a quick summary in an org file. It's fairly practical to find stuff that way using emacs search commands (I could imagine improvements). But the individual files aren't particularly organized, they are just chronological (append new stuff to the end), with occasional updates or cross-links in the middle. I don't need anything fancier. I sometimes post the notes online (Org html export) and other people find them useful despite their near-total lack of structure. This is not too different than the old fashioned way of reading books for English class: keep a yellow pad alongside of the book as you read, and as you read each page, note down the main points made on that page, along with the page number. Then when you have to write your class paper, it's pretty easy to go back over your notes to find what to use from the book, and to find it again in the book and cite it with page numbers.

ColinWright 5y ago
> What the heck is with that crazy page design? It's showing a stack of visited pages in a deep wiki structure. What you're viewing here is a dynamic view after partial exploration. You might try starting here: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  Yeah I guess it makes sense, it just threw me at first. There are also all the little pop-up notes on things. Again, it looks very time consuming to maintain. I find it sufficient to just record the info in a file, and search for what I need in it using search commands or grep. For nesting info, the tree features of org mode seem like enough. Maybe I'll need more organization if my volume of notes gets a lot larger. I do have an idea for a big optimization but it's less about the notes than the source materials. I may try to write it up sometime. I look at the really big personal notes sites (gwern.net comes to mind) and wonder how the heck the authors ever find the time. Andymatuschak.org seems like another one of those. Do the authors do anything else, have regular jobs, or anything like that?
stavros 5y ago
I had exactly the same problem thirteen years ago, so I made https://historio.us https://historio.us. You may find it useful, though it does need a bit of an update.
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  That looks nice! It is similar to what I was describing as an optimization, above. But, I would want it to be on my local machine rather than as a web service, both for privacy and to have permanent ownership of the saved bookmarks/snapshots. These days, remote-indexing page contents also seems like a technical challenge because of all the javascript and crap in the pages. That may be part of the reason search engines now suck. I guess the browser extension could upload the page contents over the network, but again I'd rather have it local, and that would be a lot faster too.
aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
>This is not too different than the old fashioned way of reading books for English class: keep a yellow pad alongside of the book as you read, and as you read each page, note down the main points made on that page, along with the page number. Wew… That’s a pretty painful way to “enjoy” a book.
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  Well, it's not reading for entertainment or relaxation, it's coursework where the assignment is to read the book and then write a paper analyzing it. I like reading but was always stupefied by the amount of reading (big armload of books and you had to actually read each of them cover to cover) that those classes required. Math was a lot easier. A class would have one book, would cover maybe half of it, and you didn't have to really read it beyond flipping pages enough to figure out how to do the problem sets. But I'm glad I took the English classes since their point was to teach critical reading and writing, which I hadn't been familiar with before, and which is an important skill. They weren't just about giving you cultcha by exposing you to litteratcha.
smarx007 5y ago
This is similar to being able to open a book at some location while reading another book and put them side by side for syntopic reading. Also see http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors and https://github.com/deathau/sliding-panes-obsidian https://github.com/deathau/sliding-panes-obsidian.

ColinWright 5y ago

> What the heck is with that crazy page design? It's showing a stack of visited pages in a deep wiki structure. What you're viewing here is a dynamic view after partial exploration. You might try starting here: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes

throwaway81523 5y ago
Yeah I guess it makes sense, it just threw me at first. There are also all the little pop-up notes on things. Again, it looks very time consuming to maintain. I find it sufficient to just record the info in a file, and search for what I need in it using search commands or grep. For nesting info, the tree features of org mode seem like enough. Maybe I'll need more organization if my volume of notes gets a lot larger. I do have an idea for a big optimization but it's less about the notes than the source materials. I may try to write it up sometime. I look at the really big personal notes sites (gwern.net comes to mind) and wonder how the heck the authors ever find the time. Andymatuschak.org seems like another one of those. Do the authors do anything else, have regular jobs, or anything like that?

stavros 5y ago

I had exactly the same problem thirteen years ago, so I made https://historio.us https://historio.us. You may find it useful, though it does need a bit of an update.

throwaway81523 5y ago
That looks nice! It is similar to what I was describing as an optimization, above. But, I would want it to be on my local machine rather than as a web service, both for privacy and to have permanent ownership of the saved bookmarks/snapshots. These days, remote-indexing page contents also seems like a technical challenge because of all the javascript and crap in the pages. That may be part of the reason search engines now suck. I guess the browser extension could upload the page contents over the network, but again I'd rather have it local, and that would be a lot faster too.

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago

>This is not too different than the old fashioned way of reading books for English class: keep a yellow pad alongside of the book as you read, and as you read each page, note down the main points made on that page, along with the page number. Wew… That’s a pretty painful way to “enjoy” a book.

throwaway81523 5y ago
Well, it's not reading for entertainment or relaxation, it's coursework where the assignment is to read the book and then write a paper analyzing it. I like reading but was always stupefied by the amount of reading (big armload of books and you had to actually read each of them cover to cover) that those classes required. Math was a lot easier. A class would have one book, would cover maybe half of it, and you didn't have to really read it beyond flipping pages enough to figure out how to do the problem sets. But I'm glad I took the English classes since their point was to teach critical reading and writing, which I hadn't been familiar with before, and which is an important skill. They weren't just about giving you cultcha by exposing you to litteratcha.

smarx007 5y ago

This is similar to being able to open a book at some location while reading another book and put them side by side for syntopic reading. Also see http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors and https://github.com/deathau/sliding-panes-obsidian https://github.com/deathau/sliding-panes-obsidian.