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The Institute for Niftiness and Flexibility

It's a Dangerous Business

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2024/03/today-is-tolkien-reading-day-6/


I put a bunch of videos about Logseq into my queue, to see if there was a reason to choose it over Quartz and Obsidian. It's got a lot of advantages, and a thriving community with a ton of plug-ins. There's not a built-in publish option, which would complicate using it to drive a blog.

I definitely need to get a commonplace book happening because I had completely forgotten about Dendron, which actually seems like exactly what I wanted all along, including having a static site publish function. I only came across it because I was scrolling back on MeFi and found a comment I made about Dendron files organized in a Johnny Decimal folder structure seemed like the best way.

One thing Logseq has over Dendron is that it has its own mobile app. Getting VS Code running on a phone is a real chore. I plan on getting into this today.

Although it's worth noting that it's all too easy to waste time "perfecting" notes rather rather than getting anything done.


Long story short, it looks like nobody has touched Dendron in years and while there are hundreds of forks, there's no community. Logseq is in active development and has an active community.

I do already have Obsidian, but I kind of hate the way it handles links. It seems like at least Logseq has a plugin that does what I want.


After jacking around with Obsidian all afternoon, I get the feeling I won't be able to get it working the way I want. Not least because it doesn't embed URLs worth a damn without a plug-in. The plug-in works okay, but it doesn't translate to Quartz, which makes it useless for my purposes. I looked at using custom CSS to style the box, but the entities and classes Quartz uses when translating the Markdown to HTML aren't really conducive to that.

Will have to see about Logseq tomorrow.