Zettlekasten

There are 26 posts filed in Zettlekasten (this is page 1 of 3).

EmacsConf2025: Zettelkasten for regular Emacs hackers

EmacsConf had their 2025 online conference in early December 2025, and I am listening to conference presentations from their YouTube playlist. I thought that the presentation “Zettelkasten for regular Emacs hackers” was a good one. The presenter, Christian Tietze, one of the people behind zettelkasten.de, talked about some zettelkasten principles, and used the Denote package in Emacs for creating new “notes” in Emacs. In addition to the 25 minute talk, he did a Q&A session for almost an hour and a half, which was very illuminating about his zettelkasten process/skills. I have embedded the videos for the talk and the Q&A session in this post – enjoy!

The need for curation and the cost of curation

Over the years, I have performed many “acts of curation”. Most of this has been simple collection of links, but several instances (Portland Protest News, Kamala Campaign Timeline) resulted in creation of websites to document a particular topic. These two sites in particular were collecting of daily links to document protests in Portland, Oregon, and the campaign of Kamala Harris for US President.

For curation of news events, it is important to keep up with content collection on a daily basis, as almost all news sites provide little to no support for tracking of stories, and searching usually turns up items in the last 2-3 weeks. For more stable topics, adding content as it is discovered is sufficient (see my Links Zettelkasten as an example).

Beyond the collection of links/information, the other primary problem is the organization of links/information. Curation, as a practice, is an attempt to organize information. My zettelkasten used individual topics in alphabetical order as headers, with links underneath. Other examples of collections include Indieseek.xyz from Brad Enslen, a curated directory. Karl Voit has a series of posts/presentations on personal information management (PIM). Chris Aldrich (through the use of tags in WordPress) has been performing some significant research on zettelkasten and the zettelkasten practices of Niklas Luhmann. All collections of this kind require effort, and most of them are for the benefit of the creator. Still, once these collections are available, they can be discovered and used by others.

What to do with too many open browser tabs

For me, I tend to open browser tabs when I am using my RSS reader River5 through my reading list app. I then keep the tabs open until I read the tab, and save it somehow if I want to keep the URL. For most of my browsing life, the “save” action is to copy the URL to a link dump file. I have used text files, Libre Office word documents, and a notes app on my phone. I used to let these files get really big, then I decided to stop doing that and creating a new file at the beginning of the month. You can probably tell that I have quite a collection of links. And, after copying links to the file, I rarely (IF EVER) would go back to those links (so mostly a write-only file). In 2022, I did try using a “zettlekasten” approach to collecting links by category (using an OPML file and a static website). However, I eventually went back to link dumps…

This weekend, with a lot of cold weather coming, anticipating I would not be going anywhere, I decided to bite the bullet and review all my open tabs, and create posts on my website for each link I wanted to save. If you are one of my 3-4 regular readers, I apologize for the link flood. I added categories for each link (all of them also have the “Links” category), started with using the Status post type, then switched to Link post type later in the day. I will be finishing the tab review today, then hope to keep up with adding links to my site. I will have to see how I like the look on the website (in other words, if I want to create a separate view for posts with the category “Links”), but I am hoping to give this a good try for the rest of the month.

Let me know if you have any ideas/techniques for managing links that you want to save!

Zettlekaste.de: Building a Second Brain and the Zettelkasten Method – This post goes into great detail contrasting the “Building a Second Brain” ideas of Tiago Forte and the Zettelkasten Method as practiced by Niklas Luhmann. The author states that both methods can be used simultaneously with little to no overlap (BASB is project focused, ZKM is knowledge-focused). It’s worth the time to read!

NetLogo is a multi-agent programmable modeling environment. It is used by many hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, and researchers worldwide.

Feedback on my zettelkasten experiment

I have decided to slow down my updates on this project, but I do have a few observations. Adding links to the OPML file was pretty easy in Drummer. I missed adding tags to some links, but will make a sweep of the over the next week. I did some re-arranging of categories, as well as added a lot of categories after the start. In the rendered file, I noticed (as well as a reader) that all the entries are fully expanded. I may experiment with trying to flatten the categories. Also, I have not explored using XSLT style sheets to render the OPML file. Still, my biggest benefit so far is that I am now entering links into the OPML file that I would have pasted in some other file, and they are categorized, which helps in navigation.

My Hugo-based zettelkasten site is lagging in updates. I chose to create a single Markdown file for each entry, and I found that it was a significant amount of typing, even though I was starting with text from the OPML file. My favorite feature of the site is being able to view links by tag. I will continue working to get this caught up with the OPML zettelkasten.

Final note: there are lots of good tools out there, this is what I chose to start with, so far it is working for me!

OPML Zettelkasten Update – Day 13

Added over 10 links today for my ZK file, new links in Mastodon, Blogging, and Writing, and added Agriculture and Directories categories. I reorganized the Podcasting section into Resources and History subsections to group the links better. There are 143 links in the OPML ZK, more than 10 links a day on average – wow! I also updated the Blogging category on my Hugo ZK site, still need to finish migrating the OPML content over. Also on the to-do list – playing with XSLT style sheets to view the OPML content by tags. However, the full ZK file list still looks pretty good.

OPML Zettelkasten Update – Day 12

Added over 10 links in today for my ZK file, new links in Mastodon, and added Software Engineering, Programming, and Music categories. I am really working on trying to clear out tabs from my daily browsing by using my ZK, so far I am keeping up!