About
This site was created by Christopher Thomas Hall.
It is a portion of my Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)1 system.
Most of these places on the Internet describe themselves as digital gardens. At least in my case, this is not an apt metaphor. A garden is well cultivated and beautiful. A cellar stores things, but not just the sake of storage, but often for change and maturation. A wine or beer cellar takes simple elements and transforms them into something better.
Not every experiment produces something wonderful, but knowledge can be gleaned from failure. Craft can be honed and skills sharpened.
Or at least that is the goal, but things often fall short of goals. Or morph into another project.
Q & A
What about yeast in the fermentation process?
All analogies fail if pressed too hard.
Or as I learned somewhere, “All models are wrong (some are useful).”
Can you define “digital garden”, “Zettlekasten”, and “Commonplace Book”?
In brief:
Every digital garden feels it has to start with a definition of a digital garden, and I too might succumb to that trend, but not today.
A Zettelkasten is a box of index cards with one atomic note per index card. Online searching will reveal everyone thinks the way they do their Zettelkasten is the way to do Zettelkästen. But if you’re inspired to do your own, take what you like and don’t worry about Zettelkasten-purity.
A Commonplace book is a book of quotes, ideas, etc., with your notes.
Why did you publish this site?
Hubris
Hey you reused that joke from Christopher’s Digital Hall. That’s some lazy writing.
That’s not a question, but once I thought to send some folks some notes on a topic and since I write in Markdown, I had to2 convert it to docx, and send it to them, but that stripped the connection to other topics and froze the piece in time, where if I added to it they would not see it unless I emailed them again, whereas a link could show the current state. Granted they probably didn’t need all the context and weren’t going to keep checking on my notes.
So, hubris.
How can I contact you to point out something you missed in your notes, or elaborate on them with my thoughts?
Use the Hall’s Contact Form
Why not create a contact form for this subdomain?
Lazy coding.
Colophon: About this site
Presentation
Fonts
Header: Courier Prime
Body: Recursive
Code: IBM Plex Mono
Colors
Bespoke theme evoking the warm glow of candlelight in a cellar with copper patina accents.
Tools
zk: a Command Line Interface (cli) for PKMs.
helix: a model editor, easier to learn than vim.
Quartz: A system to port it to the web. Opinionated, but keeps me from fiddling with the configuration.3
The page is hosted on Cloudflare.