>[!abstract]
>Building and maintaining a public online presence has been a hobby of mine since the 1990s. The present website is the latest iteration of that labor of love; in this colophon, I explain its technical and conceptual design principles, couched in some historical context about the evolution of the internet as I have experienced it.
I cultivate this [[Digital garden|digital garden]] using the note-taking app **Obsidian** ([[Ango, 2023a]]) with the **Minimal** theme set to the **Everforest** color scheme. Each page is a standalone Markdown file, which is about as future-proof as writing directly in HTML. Within Obsidian, I use just three plugins: **Dataview** ([[Brenan, 2021]]) to generate dynamic indices (i.e., maps of content), **Templater** ([[silentvoid13, 2021]]) to turn those into static pages (after [[Joschua, 2023]]), and **Publish** ([[Ango, 2023b]]) to upload changes. ^d4c53b
Each note contains an abstract that provides an overview of the salient points pertaining to the concept; and an [[Idea compass|idea compass]] (after [[Tseng, 2022]]) which links to other ideas that are upstream, similar, downstream, and opposite of that concept.
I started this project in late December 2024 with a review of the prior art, including [[Ahren, 2017|Ahren (2017)]], [[Appleton, 2020|Appleton (2020)]], [[Bernstein, 1998|Bernstein (1998)]], [[Caulfield, 2015|Caulfield (2015)]], [[Forte, 2023|Forte (2023)]], [[Luhmann, 1992|Luhmann (1992)]], [[Matuschak, n. d.|Matuschak (n. d.)]], [[Milo, n.d.|Milo (n. d.)]], [[Tseng, 2022]], [[Wanderloots, 2024|Wanderloots (2024)]], as well as the r/ObsidianMD and r/Zettelkasten subreddits. I subsequently settled on a hybrid design guided by a few principles:
1. I use my own name. Past iterations of my personal website used anonymous handles. However, this digital garden is where I learn in public, and I felt it was only fitting to match the project's intent with authenticity and transparency on my part. I am also at this stage in my life where I feel more confident sharing my interests.
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2. I write for myself. This digital garden is first and foremost a tool for *thinking*; publishing is a mean to keep myself honest, but not an end in itself. While it is pleasant to imagine that the contents of this website may be of some interest to others, I do not want to start caring about what others think to the extent that it would stifle my creativity. For these reasons, I do not keep track of my audience (corollary: this site respects your privacy).
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3. I follow the [[KISS principle]] in that I maintain only four top-level folders: **about** for meta information about the site and its author, **indices** for maps of content that serve as thematic gateways into the content, **notes** for all atomic and molecular notes, and **references** for the annotated sources (books, papers, podcasts, etc.). My experience has been that the longevity of a personal website is inversely correlated with the complexity involved in maintaining it.
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4. I do not use *subfolders* for organizing notes. The main reason is that notes may belong to several categories at once (for example, [[Great Filter]] is relevant to both astrobiology and futurology).
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5. Instead of subfolders, I use *nested tags* (e.g., #Biology/Neuroscience) to categorize all notes. Those tags are contained in the front matter of each Markdown file. To see a list of all the tags, go to the [[Index of all tags (alpha sort)]] or [[Index of all tags (count sort)]] (click on any tag there to reveal a list of the corresponding notes). Finding a suitable taxonomy for the tags was itself an ontological challenge, and as much as I would love to find a classification that is perfectly [[MECE principle|MECE]], I try to remain practical. For now, I have settled on adapting Wikipedia's [outline of academic disciplines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_academic_disciplines), but I am constantly looking for ways to refine this taxonomy.
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6. As a matter of hygiene and future-proofing, I try to maintain academic rigor in properly citing references on every note and using the seventh edition of the American Psychological Association (APA) style for citations. For trivial references such as Wikipedia, I use inline citations but skip bibliographic references that would be too cumbersome to maintain.
Next, you might be interested in the [[history]] of how this site came about.
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