>[!abstract]
>Building and maintaining a public online presence has been a hobby of mine since the early 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 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 different relative to 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 disclosing my interests to the world.
<div style="font-size: x-large; text-align:center;">∴</div>
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 will 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).
<div style="font-size: x-large; text-align:center;">∴</div>
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 (MOCs) 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.
<div style="font-size: x-large; text-align:center;">∴</div>
4. I do not use *subfolders* for categorizing 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), yet it cannot be in two folders at once.
<div style="font-size: x-large; text-align:center;">∴</div>
5. Instead of subfolders, I use *nested tags* in Pascal case (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 [[Tags]] index (click on any tag 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.
<div style="font-size: x-large; text-align:center;">∴</div>
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 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.
<div style="font-size: x-large; text-align:center;">⁂</div>