Weeknote Considerations
One of the things I deeply enjoy reading each week is other people’s weeknotes. Well, not everybodies weeknotes. I have 4 to 8 different people who share weeknotes that I check in on. It is like getting the weekly catch-up and it is calm and quaint (in the good way). I really like them and I get concerned if they miss a week.
For a while I was posting weeknotes (found with the tag: Weeknote :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net). I posted 25 of them. They were recaps of things I found of interest and wanted to share in that prior week (or so). I stopped posting them as the timing was tough at the end of the week, but the creation was getting easier as they just were things I’d pull out of my daily notes to myself in roughly the same categories.
Not Sure If I’ll Return to Posting Weeknotes Again
I am really not sure that I will return to posting weeknotes again, but it is a rather Ouroboros-shaped reason. In the past year or so I set up local (on my laptop) search of my own blog, which moved to the Lab - vanderwal.net, and then on to my blog portion of my site.
In searching my own content to see if I’ve posted on a subject before, I would find what I was looking for in a weeknote post. But, going to the post it was buried in the muddle with other things. I also was finding using categories to find related content when it was surfacing weeknotes and I’d have to dig in the weeknote to find the relevance it was connecting to. Both of these bothered me and from a finding, pointing to, and sharing with others perspective. I really think it is a less than good experience.
The weeknote for me was a means to get back to posting to my blog more regularly. I joked that Twitter ate my blog in 2006 (I’ve seen my data and it sure did). Then moving to a better note tool and note making daily that had me writing again in pretty much my old manner like blogging, but I just wasn’t posting. I didn’t complete the workflow for it to be a blog post. I would write and reuse locally, but the next steps in a blogging / sharing workflow did’t happen. A little over a year ago when I updated my blog management tool, that was part of the backend update, that made posting easier and I was posting a little more. But, when I’d look it was a week or more stretches between posts and I’d been writing like I was blogging, but I was my own reader.
Using Blaugust (Going in on Blaugust :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net) as impetus to get the workflow back part of my habit of finishing the steps is a good thing for posting, I think.
My Notes to Post Workflow
I’ve kept notes in text in a directory since 2003. It started as plain text along with dash or asterisk bullets. That turned into using Notional and then NVAlt at some point. When NVAlt stopped opening I set Obsidian to watch over the directory in June 2020 and I’ve not looked back. I did a quick modification and the notes that weren’t in markdown (I fully shifted my writing to markdown in 2011 when I had a hard drive crash and access to application that wrapped notes made my notes something I couldn’t open for a few days and with my parents passing and needing notes, a proprietary container was no longer an option – actually it is a bad idea from the start).
I keep a Daily Dump markdown note that is structured with sub-headings as prompts and keep notes in there. One of the things I love about Obsidian is the ability to have transclusions, so when I am writing in my daily note, but it makes sense to have it as a stand alone note to reference, or to become a blog post, I just highlight the segment and right click to export that to a new note and it links to with a backlink (think wiki link), but putting an exclamation mark in front of it brings that note into the daily note to show it.
This means I can create a note that has a “blog-shape” to it that started in my daily note. It is in markdown and I have a title on it and other metadata. It lives in my note directory. I click the ellipses in Obsidian’s right corner of the panel to “Show in Finder”. The finder window for Mac opens with the markdown note highlighted. I right click on it (I don’t use a mouse, so double finger tap is actually what I do) and select to open the file in iA Writer. iA Writer is my longer writing app, but also what I review and edit something that I will post (or transform to a more formal document). When that is done I drag the proxy icon for the file in the titlebar of iA Writer to the icon for the Marked app (Marked 3) in my Dock and it opens and I select “preview toggle” and it shows me very well structured HTML (it matches the scripting I did years ago to do much the same, but is much less hassle) then I highlight and copy and paste into my site’s blog management tool, add the title and select categories and it is posted.
The multiple apps all are working with regular markdown all in the same file. I modify something in one and it changes in all the other interfaces. I own the files and they can be opened in any text app or any markdown focussed app. IA Writer I really like for calm focussed writing, reading what I’ve written, and editing. Marked (now Marked 3) just does a nice markdown conversion to very good standards compliant HTML, plus adds the sub-header IDs for anchor links, which I used to do mostly by hand when I ran my own convert to HTML scripts. Marked also can transform markdown to structured Word, well designed PDF, and more, yet I use it for the one simple task.
In my blog management screen, I manually trigger the build of my RSS and then trigger syndication notifications after I have run a manual visual check and test all the links. Once I’ve finished writing it is 2 to 5 minutes to edit in iA Writer and post.