Roam as a slip box

  • Three questions immediately posed by the author that I share:
    1. Where should I write my notes? Should each note be its own page, or its own block? How should I manage note metadata, if at all?
    2. How should I distinguish between types of notes? How should literature notes be categorized separately from permanent notes, and how should both of them be categorized separately from other uses of Roam?
    3. How should I connect my notes to each other? By inline page links, by sub-blocks, or something else?
  • So far, my own answers to these questions have been as follows:
    1. I write arbitrary notes/thoughts in daily notes as they come up, notes from specific sources inside of a file created for that source alone, and more general, broad notes in “regular” wiki pages. I supposed a detailed answer to this question depends on the definition of a note, but in general “sections of content” can comprise either an entire page or a block of a larger topic page. As for metadata, this is handled primarily by templates, and then whatever other attributes I deem useful for tracking notes better and building them into the public web front.
    2. I mostly addressed this in the last point. Literature notes, or notes specifically made on sources, are written in a “feed” note with the title of the resource itself. “Permanent notes” are pretty much distilled notes from sources and thoughts that end up in a regular wiki page, and, while often inspired by many sources, are considered original notes.
    3. I have just been adding links to other pages via quick wikilinks. These are pretty much “page links”, although I would like to reference specific blocks when possible. Unfortunately at the moment the notion of a block is only loosely defined, and I don’t have the mechanisms in place for quickly creating references to specific lines/blocks. This is a TODO in the Vim roam objective.
  • The author answers these three questions (using Roam research itself, of course) as follows:
    1. All notes are taken in daily pages. That’s pretty much it other than some tagging addressing the other questions.
    2. Notes are distinguished by tags, namely #litnotes and #permnotes to distinguish the lines in the daily notes between literature notes (source notes) and permanent notes written in your own words.
    3. Notes are references primarily with “block references”; since most valuable snippets are part of a daily note, it doesn’t make much sense to link to the entire page. There are also links to other important wiki pages throughout the note’s text, but the block references are used to reference content from other notes in the Zettelkasten.
  • This is pretty much all there is to this article. Overall not a bad take; I like how simple it is to just start making a note in the daily page and then link it in to other Zettels with block references, wiki pages with normal wikilinks, and tag the “note type” with tags. From the perspective of a Zettelkasten, I have less problems with this approach than I originally thought I might.