Author Topic: I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten (Read 489189 times)

wraith808 · « **Reply #425 on:** June 11, 2020, 03:23 PM »

FYI- Roam has released its pricing. It's $15/month. You can continue for free right now, but as at some point they will do away with the free plan (and their language is shaming people that don't want to pay that price), I'm done with Roam. That's just way too much a month for me. Emphasized the part below about the not free forever part...

Beloved Roamans:

Have a few major updates for you.

First - and most important - we shipped pricing yesterday for new users who wanted to get off the waitlist, but ROAM IS STILL FREE FOR YOU IF YOU AREN'T READY TO PAY.

Just scroll down past the pricing component that appears when you sign in. You'll see all the Roam "graphs" (databases - might change this term) you've created, and any shared ones that you've been added to.

Second - and I should have sent an update to all of y'all many weeks ago, but I've written a bit about the scaling problems we 5-7 weeks ago, and why we put the waitlist up in the first place.

For those of you who had days where you were locked out of your Roam with the dreaded infinite astrolabe, for those of you who had syncing problems and lost notes - I can't express my regret enough.

I do hope that our local backup system meant much less lost work than the first time we had scaling problems back in February - but my communication was way worse 6 weeks ago than it was the first time - and I'm very sorry you had to go through those problems without helpful communication from us.

Third - for you privacy oriented folks - and particularly for those of who want to roam with thoughts you can't trust to any 3rd party organization (state or trade secrets, info that could get you killed or thrown in prison) - we finally shipped local-only databases.

Right now this feature is only available for users on the Believer Plan - which might be a good incentive to upgrade - but we do plan to eventually make this available to everyone, even folks who got into the beta who aren't paying for any plan.

You can learn more about how local databases work here. tl;dr they work off the same local storage system we use that enables offline editing in normal Roam, we just don't send any data to our servers.

Now back to subject of pricing.

IF you are one of the people who have been wanting to give us money for ages (and thank you for reminding us of this so often!), you now can! When you sign in here, you'll see this pricing component and can pick a plan that works for you.

WARNING - if you change plans, our payment processor removes the free trial and you'll be charged right away.

IF that price is too much for you but you still want to pay - please fill out the ROAM SCHOLARS application form!

IF you do not want to pay - either because you aren't sure about Roam yet (what are you waiting for!) or you just want to milk the free plan as long as you can (shame on you for not supporting tool makers!) you do not need to worry, YOU CAN KEEP USING ROAM FOR FREE.

I know I've tweeted at points that we are keeping beta free for another month, but I've removed those tweets now, because honestly we aren't particularly thrilled to build a paywall anytime soon - and frankly have bigger features that we're more excited about (like full offline, a desktop app, the API, plugin support, and getting mobile apps).

Finally, if you haven't been relentlessly following us on social media, there have been a bunch of other huge updates in the past few weeks, and a ton of amazing things coming out of the community.

We shipped custom theming and CSS - and there have been some beautiful ones created by the community.

Here is a tweet thread with video instructions to set up themes, a link to where you can find the themes (and Paypal links to donate to the creators), and some screenshots of featured ones.

www.RoamPublic.com has launched (thank you Francis Miller of www.RoamBrain.com). It highlights public Roams with canonical texts - like the King James Bible, The Qur'an (in English and Arabic), the Mahabarata, and other great works - all formatted for easy import into your personal Roam.

As a warning, these texts are large, and will definitely slow down your database. To help deal with this, we also shipped an improvement to the ALL PAGES so that you can bulk delete pages, or export a subset of a graph - suggest you export only the sections of these public Roams you are most interested in, so that Roam is still reasonably quick for you to load on mobile, or with slow internet.

Have shipped a bunch of other small improvements and new features over the past few weeks. To learn more about those, check out our Change Log.

We also opened up a new forum and support site - since Slack was archiving all old messages.

Dormouse · « **Reply #426 on:** June 12, 2020, 03:58 AM »

I can only get 14 day free trial.

And it's a pretty steep price.
And the whole premise of this thread works with Obsidian and not Roam.
So I've still not tried it yet.

Equally I can understand where they are coming from. Online databases aren't cheap to run when they are as intensive as Roam, and their coding capacity seems overstretched given the descriptions of multiple bugs and variable performance. So they need to spend and will need proved income to avoid handing the business over to venture capital. And the 5 year subscription money will help tackle the financial needs during this pinch point.

And for the cultists using it intensively as a core part of their work, even $15 is very cheap.
And if three people share with one database each, then that's only $5.

But all the accounts I've seen suggest it takes long time to learn how to use it to the max, and its hard to see how more casual users can get value from it at this price. afaics, there's the intention for a cheaper, freemium offer to them, when they can work it out, but we'll see.

Dormouse · « **Reply #427 on:** June 12, 2020, 04:03 AM »

And seems they raised more money in the first two days of the five year subscription than they earned or raised in their first two years.

wraith808 · « **Reply #428 on:** June 12, 2020, 02:25 PM »

I guess if you get it, you really get it. But from my use, I'm not one that sees the value of $180 a year for it. Even at half that price I wouldn't see it.

Dormouse · « **Reply #429 on:** June 12, 2020, 03:47 PM »

I've decided not to bother with a trial after watching a few videos. I knew quite a bit before, but that clinched it.

It's effectively an outliner on research steroids. I've never been a great user of workflowy type outliners- rather like my aversion to wikis. Just a personal bias. Also saw that access from a mobile browser is limited. I like documents I can do anything with and I'm happy with them being short. Which brings me back to Obsidian again.

What I would say in Roam's favour is that I recognise how easy it makes it for people to just write whatever is in their minds. I'm not in a position to judge the value of that productivity, but can see why so many describe it as unlocking their ability to write. It removes the writer's block that afflicts so many.

panzer · « **Reply #430 on:** June 12, 2020, 04:59 PM »

How I GTD in Roam Research:
http://vincelutton.c...td-in-roam-research/

Dormouse · « **Reply #431 on:** June 12, 2020, 05:34 PM »

How I GTD in Roam Research:
http://vincelutton.c...td-in-roam-research/
-panzer (June 12, 2020, 04:59 PM)

That's impressive!
And a good demonstration of what it can do.

Dormouse · « **Reply #432 on:** June 13, 2020, 04:22 PM »

I've noticed Conaw retweeting a post liking iOS after switching from Android and saying they'll never switch back. That tells me that Android users will always be second class in Roam. Firms my decision not to try it.

He always seems to find ways to put people off. I'm not aware that he has ever managed a team before, so it will be interesting to see how he manages.

panzer · « **Reply #433 on:** June 14, 2020, 01:23 AM »

Building a Second Brain: The Illustrated Notes:
https://maggieappleton.com/basb

Dormouse · « **Reply #434 on:** June 14, 2020, 02:49 AM »

If only brains actually worked like that

Nod5 · « **Reply #435 on:** June 14, 2020, 06:17 AM »

FYI- Roam has released its pricing. It's $15/month. You can continue for free right now, but as at some point they will do away with the free plan (and their language is shaming people that don't want to pay that price), I'm done with Roam. That's just way too much a month for me. Emphasized the part below about the not free forever part...
-wraith808 (June 11, 2020, 03:23 PM)

Only shows how much is in flux right now with these different tools.

One thing I hope for is standardization of some of the newer features. Like double bracket style links, timestamps as references and automatic backlinking, autocompletion and highlighting tailored for note taking, and more. A superset of CommonMark with features for working with information in large sets of interrelated plaintext files.

I've previously mentioned using Everything and AutoHotkey for a DIY quick linking feature. Basically, datestamps or unique filenames as links and a script that on hotkey press copy selection, silently search Everything for that string and take appropriate action. For example, if the selected string has a unique match and it is an image or pdf or txt file, then open it in a preset application. If it is another filetype then open Explorer and select it. If there are multiple matches then open the Everything window with the search results. Etcetera. This can be used regardless of what program I'm reading the plaintext note file in.

Maybe one could also make a decent DIY auto backlinking feature that does not depend on a specific all-features-included note taking app (Roam, Obsidian, ...) by using ripgrep, Everything and AutoHotkey together. Detect plaintext file changes and extract and update backlinks to the currently active plaintext document. Backlinks could show in a child window anchorded to the side of whatever app (Notepad++, ...) used to edit/read a plaintext file.

Dormouse · « **Reply #436 on:** June 14, 2020, 12:29 PM »

One thing I hope for is standardization of some of the newer features. Like double bracket style links, timestamps as references and automatic backlinking, autocompletion and highlighting tailored for note taking, and more. A superset of CommonMark with features for working with information in large sets of interrelated plaintext files.
-Nod5 (June 14, 2020, 06:17 AM)

Standardisation in markdown?

Dormouse · « **Reply #437 on:** June 14, 2020, 12:36 PM »

I think double bracket links are spreading though.
I agree with most of what you say, though ripgrep and AHK are likely to be beyond me.
I can stick with Obsidian for now and see where it goes. Likely to be around a while I think. It's already pretty polished given it's only 3 months in, and developers have a good record with Dynalist.

wraith808 · « **Reply #438 on:** June 14, 2020, 02:45 PM »

One thing I hope for is standardization of some of the newer features. Like double bracket style links, timestamps as references and automatic backlinking, autocompletion and highlighting tailored for note taking, and more. A superset of CommonMark with features for working with information in large sets of interrelated plaintext files.
-Nod5 (June 14, 2020, 06:17 AM)
Standardisation in markdown?

-Dormouse (June 14, 2020, 12:29 PM)

People are trying. The creator is resisting.

panzer · « **Reply #439 on:** June 15, 2020, 04:02 PM »

GeistMap is a personal knowledge network for taking notes and mapping concepts:
https://github.com/bryanph/GeistMap

Cotoami is a platform where people can weave a large network of wisdom from tiny ideas:
https://github.com/cotoami/cotoami

Dormouse · « **Reply #440 on:** June 16, 2020, 01:38 PM »

And another one

But I think I've passed my trying things limit for the moment.

Nod5 · « **Reply #441 on:** June 16, 2020, 01:54 PM »

Re: markdown standardization. StackOverflow is switching to CommonMark. I do not envy the person(s) who will sort out all the regex issues during the conversions of the old data.

Dormouse · « **Reply #442 on:** June 16, 2020, 03:09 PM »

Re: markdown standardization. StackOverflow
-Nod5 (June 16, 2020, 01:54 PM)

I notice that they also said

Things like spoilers, MathJax, circuit diagrams, stack snippets, etc. are used on several network sites. We're going to continue to support all of those custom syntax elements even if they're not part of the official CommonMark specification.

So standardisation, but only up to a point.

Dormouse · « **Reply #443 on:** June 16, 2020, 03:11 PM »

GeistMap is a personal knowledge network for taking notes and mapping concepts:
-panzer (June 15, 2020, 04:02 PM)

this seems quite interesting, but I'm not sure about the traction

Dormouse · « **Reply #444 on:** June 16, 2020, 03:15 PM »

People are trying. The creator is resisting.
-wraith808 (June 14, 2020, 02:45 PM)

I'd like to think it will evolve if the more important players move in the same direction. The overall cost of maintenance pushes them in that direction, although everyone is always wanting extras so a system to agree on those is what's needed.

rjbull · « **Reply #445 on:** June 16, 2020, 04:29 PM »

I just stumbled across this:

Info-Base - Personal Informations Manager / Freeform Database

http://freeware.pers...ft.ch/program_en.htm

9.7 - 14.06.2020
5.0 MB

a "clone" (with new options) of the good and old "Info-Select" (Version 1.0) ...

supports Unicode, external and internal links.
very fast (also with very large amount of data) and effectively for any kind of data ...
no complex formatting, only TAB and CR/LF.
the rules are limited to the bare minimum and they can be adjusted arbitrarily.
the idea is that of a "note spear" (stack) on the desk.
new notes are easily and quickly placed on top of the appropriate stack.
free customizable templates for different data.
clip import from other programs (f.e. browser, e-mail client).
extremely fast full-text search in each stack (local F4) or in all stacks (global F3).
combined filter (with logical and), bookmarks, alarm by date (tickler).
all databases can be edited with any unicode-text-editor.
unlimited (only disc space) number of notes / stacks.
the ideal "Zettelkasten" ...

Data from Info-Select can be imported. (IS 1.0 for each stack: "Group", "Export to file" or in newer Versions: export as "Note Delimited", may change (temp.) in InfoBase the "file delimiter" !)

My emphasis. I doubt it would fit the dizzyingly complex requirements of DC's 'zettelkasteners', though

Warning - I haven't tried this, and MBAM blocks the site as a Trojan. It's done that so frequently of late that I'm beginning to ignore it

Dormouse · « **Reply #446 on:** June 16, 2020, 05:25 PM »

Warning - I haven't tried this, and MBAM blocks the site as a Trojan.
-rjbull (June 16, 2020, 04:29 PM)

I wondered whether Info Select needed cloning, and then noticed the .ch.
After your MBAM warning, I decided not to visit the site.

superboyac · « **Reply #447 on:** June 16, 2020, 07:34 PM »

Wow, thread still going strong...

OK, well I'm back to continue with this experiment. Nearly lost my job due to Covid, but I got a new client and am ok for a little bit.

I still haven't been able to stick to this method, and I still want to try as I am very envious of the output productivity I am expecting. Here are my personal updates. I will go back through this thread to see what has developed with you guys also.

I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten
I like this visual, it is helpful.
Going off that, this is how I see things going for me:

Inbox, somewhere to dump all incoming things. I definitely will use a folder for an inbox.

Archive, once a thought/nugget is carefully processed and whittled down, it goes permanently here. This is the actual zettel, so I will also have this: a container where all the final stuff go into.

Reference database, I don't think I need this. This part is handled better with all my other software, like the ones that can search, and just have all the media organized somewhere else. I think I’ll avoid this. I use so many things to store/index files, search files, etc. So I don't want or need to bring in massive volumes of stuff. That will be done with more powerful software, and several of them at that. I'll skip this.

Output, this is where I’ll put everything together for the final output. I may not need this either, or only partially, as I think the final output will also be done using several other software. I think instead of real output, I may use an output staging area, where i bring in all the archive links. But from there, I will take it to the other final form software like MS Word, Indesign, Final Draft, etc. I don't need to do this in the zettel.

That's where I'm at.

Dormouse · « **Reply #448 on:** June 16, 2020, 08:32 PM »

Reference database, I don't think I need this.
-superboyac (June 16, 2020, 07:34 PM)

Nice to have you back

What you say makes sense, and it's all about what makes sense for you, but I'd query this.
The reference database isn't a set of unlinked reference sources - the notes in the zettelkasten should take you to, or include directly, the precise part of the reference material that is relevant. And the process of searching references should lead to more thoughts that go in the mix. If a worthwhile thought is made, it should be noted. The references themselves aren't really part of the zettelkasten, but there is a set of fixed relationships with it, rather like a label sewn into an item of clothing.

Now, I'm not advocating you do this, but it is the zettelkasten system.

I'm still faffing around with techniques and programs, so I'm still nowhere really, although I feel subjectively that I have got a long way.

wraith808 · « **Reply #449 on:** June 17, 2020, 09:14 AM »

I like this visual, it is helpful.
-superboyac (June 16, 2020, 07:34 PM)

It is! Thanks for sharing - I can really see the workflow from this image. My only problem is the same thing that I have with everything- I can collect, but going through the collection is a problem for me. I need to do the first two steps at the same time.