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Zettelkasten
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2026-07-24
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Niklas Luhmann kept a slip-box of roughly 90,000 index cards over his working life, each one a single idea, each one cross-referenced to others by hand-written note numbers. He credited it, half-jokingly, with most of his output as a sociologist.
The idea is connection between notes is where new thinking actually happens.
Wiki-links are the same idea with the cross-referencing done automatically. ValuesThe first entry. This site exists for gitminder as the daily-commit driver for two Beeminder goals, and it leans on wiki-links ,like colour-theory to connect ideas as they accumulate, in the tradition of a digital garden more than a blog.[^1]… pointing at Colour TheoryGruvbox's rainbow accent set doubles as the symbol taxonomy's colour legend, see values for the entry that started this. One per entry type: red for quotes, yellow for bookmarks, green for notes, blue for diary entries, purple for snippets, and… pointing at Symbol TaxonomyI'm using single-character symbols, one per type as a quick visual cue: | type | symbol | example | | -------- | ------ | ------------------------ | | quote | > | on-writing-daily | | bookmark | ⚹ | eleventy-interlinker |… is a slip-box relationship; the Eleventy InterlinkerObsidian-style wikilinks, backlinks, and embeds for Eleventy. Used for both dead-link reporting and stub-generation. The resolvingFns is why I use this instead of the lighter eleventy-plugin-backlinks alternative. It makes the hover-preview excerpts on wikilinks possible. The dead-link-to-stub pipeline is the… resolves the reference and builds the backlink at compile time, instead of manually by hand.
Luhmann's cards were atomic, with one idea each. Entries here are looser, closer to a commonplace bookLong before "digital garden" was a term, readers kept commonplace books: bound notebooks of quotations, observations, and excerpts copied out by hand, organized under personal headings so they could be found again later. John Locke published an indexing method for… than a true zettelkasten.