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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 atomicOne idea per note, self-contained enough to survive being read outside the context it was written in. Luhmann's slip-box already worked this way, but the zettelkasten method frames atomicity as a discipline more than a rule, a compass rather than…, 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.