#metagarden

[wanderingmindthoughts]

currently reading "building a second brain", as part of my efforts towards this blog but also in general in my life -my phd is demanding a lot of knowledge-organization skills that I don't really have. I want to use this blog as an organization tool about my thougths and beliefs, but I'm still hesitant on how personal I want to get. like, I'm okay sharing philosophical concepts and developing them, but I don't think I want to publicly think about my trauma and personal relationships. I would love to use this for my academic stuff, but I guess I can get into trouble about sharing research before it's published -so it may be prudent to use some kind of private note-taking tool for that (I'm considering logseq)

[wanderingmindthoughts]

now I have a feed rss button on my blog! it's only accesible from the desktop version I'm afraid, but if you want to add my blog to a rss reader all you have to do is right-click on the rss button:

right-click and select the "copy link" option. then you can just paste that link into your preferred rss reader, and it should work! if you do a left-click on the button it'll show you the rss file, so you can also download it if you want.

you can do this with any tumblr blog just by adding "/rss" at the end of their url, tho. I just decided to put that link on a button to remark this functionality and make it explicit to any user

[wanderingmindthoughts]

why Tumblr?

there are a few options for digital gardens; why did I choose tumblr?

I am already familiar with tumblr, unlike the other options. and tumblr has the basic settings that I wanted:

making posts with a simple but flexible editor.

works both in desktop and phone (for a certain measure of "work", at least)

the reblog function allows me to grow notes iteratively, which I think is an interesting feature in a mind garden.

tagging posts!

an archive of posts that is searchable by words and also by tags.

the themes.

the themes were an important reason. as tumblr isn't really made for mind gardens in particular, I think I could add the functionalities that its missing by tweaking the theme of the blog. some of this functionalities that I need are:

bi-directional links. without them I don't have the ability to directly link posts to each other. this is annoying as fuck, but I could add a "backlinks" box in each post that displays which other posts link to this one.

as a direct consequence of the lack of backlinks, tumblr cannot showcase its posts as a graph of linked posts. can that be done with a theme? I do not know! I guess I'll figure it out.

mind you, I'll have to learn how to do any of this because my knowledge about web development is very limited

[wanderingmindthoughts]

I have just updated this blog's canonical tag list! I do this from time to time, but it just occurred to me that it could be useful to explain why I have such a list in the first place.

whenever I write a post -for example, about chatgpt- I put two kinds of tags on it:

tags like "ai", "gen ai" and "chatgpt", which I put in the post just to help it reach more people than just my followers. I don't keep track of these tags and they may vary from post to post, so I consider them to be "non-canonical".

in addition to those tags, I (try to) always put a "canonical" tag related to the topic of the post. the one that I chose for anything related to ai is "artificial intelligence".

the purpose of canonical tags is purely archivistic, so I try to ensure that they're distinctive and consistent. listing all of them in a page not only helps other people navigate the blog, it also keeps me from tagging a bunch of related posts with similar but slightly different tags.

looking up the list of canonical tags is also a useful way to get a picture of what I talk most often about, which I think is particularly useful for people who are considering following me... but I think most people use tumblr from their phones, so they may not even know that this page exists :_(

[wanderingmindthoughts]

I just did a bunch of tag wrangling on my blog. I have retired some tags that I was no longer using, and I have merged some others -the #data curation and #data wrangling tags, for example, since I usually use them redundantly.

I have also created three new tags:

#not my post, which is simply to tag reblogs that I have added nothing to. I avoid doing this because this blog is more of a mind garden than a typical tumblrblog, but precisely beacuse it's rare I think it's useful to have a quick way of finding all of these "clean" reblogs

#phd life, which is a bit self-explanatory. I just finished my vacations, I have an exiting year ahead, and I'm getting more into the habit of writing here, so I hope I'll be able to share interesting experiences :)

I have officialy canonised the #fanfic tag, since I'm very passionate about it and reading, archiving and commenting fics is a big part of my daily life.

I considered retiring my #atheism tag because it's been a long time since I posted anything in there, but religion (and lack of thereof) takes a huge space in my head right now so I've left it in the hopes that I'll post more about it. you can check the entire tag list here

[wanderingmindthoughts]

I can't focus at work and I'm already done with the urgent things of the day, so fuck it.

I initially made this blog as a mind garden, which means that, ideally, all posts should have at least a link to some other post. the idea is to allow readers to navigate the blog in a way that reflects my chain-of-thought, and also to allow me (the thinker) to revise how and what I think.

I have been doing that by using tumblr's tag system to organise and classify my thoughts around similar themes, and also by putting links to other posts when necessary. but a thing I'd wanted to do since I first made the blog is to modify the permalink page of my posts to show a list of outgoing and incoming links to the current page.

so, instead of my permalink pages looking like this:

it would look like this (just with a properly formatted list with the titles of the posts)

I don't even know that much about web development AND tumblr doesn't usually allow javascript, so I'm just tooling around for a bit.

I can kind of imagine how to do the outgoing links, since I "only" need to find a way of collecting the links in {Body}, which honestly sounds like a pain already; but for incoming links I'll need to check the {Body} of all existing posts, extract their links and then see which of them are the permalink of the current page. which sounds more like a fever dream than a pain.

[wanderingmindthoughts]

just added a button on my blog for my bookwyrm account, since I want to talk more about my reading in here but I still intend to use bookwyrm for logging and review purposes. this is going to be for more organic freeform reflections and some yelling

[wanderingmindthoughts]

I haven't written in here since february 😬

in march I discovered logseq, and not only have I become a bit obsessed with it, it's also proved to be perfect for many of the uses I had planned to use this blog for. I am considering using logseq for my more private and rambley thoughts, and keep this blog for interactions and for publishing more polished things -all of them still open to discussion, of course.

another reason I haven't been posting is because I got wayyy more interactions than I was expecting, and I've been dealing with it poorly. I still want to learn how to deal with that, I think it would be beneficial for me in many ways! also, for some reason, tumblr hasn't been letting me use the "answer" button under my own posts, so when someone answers something interesting, the only way I can answer is by screencapping it and answering in a reblog/new post, which strikes me as a bit rude. like, if the person wanted to be reblogged, they would have answered to me in a reblog? I dunno.

anyways! logseq is amazing, and when I have figured out a proper workflow with it I'll probably blog about it. logseq is taking over some of the organizational aspects of my life, and the change is being a bit rough because I've been organising myself almost exclusively with trello for... close to ten years, I think. like, my life has *not* been falling apart during march, exactly, but I was used to being clued into a structure by a particular digital tool. now that it has become obsolete, and until I figure out/get used to the new clues and new structure, I'm more forgetful and tired than usual. this also feeds into me not blogging; I no longer have time blocks for "free time" in my routine (I am technically at work rn).

anyways x2, that's what's been up with me this last month. I have some things in the backburner for this blog already, let's see if I can wrap up my work and do something about that