03-07-2021

My white whale^[White Whale] is a convenient, natural, and note-preserving information organization and presentation system. None of the ones I have tried so far are perfect.

In 2019 and 2020, when I tried to cram an entire textbook’s worth of information which I was covering for MATH 314 at UPenn on one markdown file (hello advanced linear algebra page^[]), I ran into the issue of how to separate topics from each other when they’re so closely related.

I thought I solved this issue by writing shorter posts which are a bit more conversational, but then I risk writing too little about a topic.

The closest I’ve gotten to a perfect organizational system is a folder on my laptop, containing subfolders full of pictures, note scans, textbook pdfs, code snippets, etc. I want to see if I can bring this system + a guide on how to read it to a website. I might be able to do this with Rails…..hmmm…..

For now I will have to accept that I trade information for readability when writing on a blog.

March 6th, 2023:

I am getting closer to a system which makes sense to me, even if it looks strange. Currently, all my digitized notes are organized in a Dendron^[See Kevin Lin’s creation at https://www.dendron.so/] graph-style “second brain”, but they are private. I generally follow this system of knowledge and technical information management: I am slowly publishing the notes which can go public to this site but Dendron uses hierarchecal dot naming convention, and it doesn’t jam too well with Jekyll’s prederred folder structure for rendering (Li)