You’re soaking in it.

I have my stuff at a few different domains:

1. copingmechanism.com. This brand new blog. Running WordPress Ghost WordPress.
2. baty.net. My blog since 2000. Generated by Hugo. I’ll probably move the thousands of posts to archive.baty.net and make baty.net an introduction and jumping off point. I have mixed feelings about this, but here we are.
3. Roam Research. I have a public Roam database that I pour words into throughout the day. Nothing is edited, or even well-considered, for that matter.
4. micro.baty.net. Short posts using the wonderful micro.blog service.
5. rudimentarylathe.org. This was my wiki for quite a while. Built with TiddlyWiki, but now idle.

I’m afraid there will never be such a thing as The One True Blog for me. But, for now, I’ll be focusing my blogging attention here. There will also be random gibberish in Roam, and short posts at micro.blog.

There’s no real story behind why I’m doing this. It’s just that I’m currently bored with plain text and I’m looking to avoid the hassle of posting using Hugo, which runs baty.net. I’m feeling very pointy-clicky again, so WordPress it is.

I asked around about domain name preferences, and it was a close race between copingmechanism.com and baty.net. The former won, and it’s what I preferred anyway. So that worked out.

So here it is. Post number one at the new copingmechanism.com. I hope you’ll stick around.

This tweet by Mike Lee Williams started something:

---Tweet missing---

Note: I'm now doing it this way instead.

I look at a lot of articles on the web. And by “look at” I mean “skim distractedly without actually reading”. What happens is that I click a link and sort of scan the article until becoming distracted or interrupted by something else on the screen. I waste a lot of time this way, with little gain.

Mike’s approach to reading articles makes sense to me, so I’ve adopted a similar process and it’s working well.

I no longer try to read longer-form articles right away. I instead send them to Instapaper and, after a day or two, review the inbox, delete the ones I no longer care about, and print the ones I do. For printing, I use Mike’s user stylesheet for Firefox reader mode. The print layout is compact and readable and I can mark them up with a pencil and highlighter while away from the distractions of a screen.

I keep recent articles scattered around my desk until I feel I’ve gotten what I need out of them. I then scan the marked up versions into DEVONthink and manually enter the highlights from the most important articles into Roam.

This print-first process is a good way for me to actually learn from things I find on the web.

I discovered Roam in December, 2019 and thought, “Wow! This is exactly the thing I’ve been looking for” even though it was buggy, less than pretty, and still too new to count on. And yet, the more I dug in, the more I liked it. I remember telling people that “this thing pays dividends on your notes!” I’d finally found the ultimate tool for my Personal Knowledge Management System. (I don’t call it a “Zettelkasten” for two reasons. First, the way I use Roam isn’t really as a Zettelkasten. Second, I can’t help but think that Zettelkasten is kind of a show-off word so it puts me off.)

Then I heard they were going to charge $30/month for the privilege of using Roam and, although I would be able to pay, it made me pause. I got over the “But you don’t own your data!” problem, but $30/month for the rest of my life made me twitchy.

At the time, the only real contender for me was TiddlyWiki. I love TiddlyWiki. It’s what made my Rudimentary Lathe wiki possible (and fun). TiddlyWiki does transclusion, can do backlinking, is a single HTML file that I control. And not long after Roam started making waves, TiddlyWiki fans started improving TiddlyWiki to emulate some of Roam’s most notable features. We ended up with Stroll, and it’s very nice. I didn’t see using it for everything the way I planned to with Roam. I don’t know why, really. Just a feeling. So, I kept looking.

Until Roam came along, I took most of my notes in one of two places, TheBrain and Org mode. Org mode kicks the ass of everything else for general note-taking, text processing, task management, you name it. But after a few weeks with Roam, I’m no longer interested in writing notes in anything that doesn’t include bi-directional links. Backlinking is key, this is why I’ve loved TheBrain for so long. That’s all it does (ok, not true, but it’s what it does best). But I dislike taking notes in TheBrain, and I never really get into the flow. There’s a lot of friction getting stuff into TheBrain. This is why I’d link stuff with TheBrain but would take notes in Org mode. Not ideal.

Suddenly, Jethro Kuan created Org-roam. Now we were talking! Org mode with terrific backlink support, titles rather than file names, aliases, never-ending customization options, and a solid database cache behind it all. It’s so very good. But, it means I’ve got to use Emacs. I love Emacs, but I tire of the mental overhead it causes me. I wasn’t sure that I wanted my “Second Brain” to be stuck in an editor that often hurts my first brain. And as great and powerful as the org-mode format is, Markdown is easier, ubiquitous, and works with just about every modern editor. I felt myself wishing Org-roam used Markdown. It doesn’t, and it shouldn’t, so I hesitated.

Then, of course, someone linked me to Obsidian, “A second brain, for you, forever.” Nice. Let’s see, Markdown files on my own device. A fast, capable editor, backlinks galore, a built in graph, support for Daily Notes, and a plug-in system that could take me who-knows where. I spent a week with it and thought I’d found what I was looking for.

Except, it’s not an outliner. I really missed Roam’s outliner based editor. I missed the block-level references and transclusion from Roam. I missed that it was just a tab away from where I was usually already working. I liked that Roam is automatically everywhere I can fire up a browser. I don’t have to decide how to use the thing on my iPad. It’s just a website. Mostly, I missed the flow Roam somehow makes possible. I can’t put my finger on it, but Roam is the most pleasant, easiest, and entirely capable option for a PKM.

Roam isn’t the choice I wanted to make. I wanted to use Org-roam. Still do. I also find Obsidian compelling. But, I had to stop losing sleep thinking about it, so I made the decision to go all-in with Roam. It’s the outliner, simplicity, and block-level references that clinched it. Many will say that I don’t “own my data” but I kind of do. I export the entire DB as JSON daily and could probably recreate the thing in Obsidian or something else in a few hours. I don’t feel locked in, but I’m sure some people disagree. Good for them, that’s what Org-roam and Obsidian are for.

Roam Research opened the waitlist and introduced pricing yesterday. I could still use Roam for free for a while, being an early beta user, but I needed to commit. To that end, I paid $500 for the “True Believer” plan. It’s a 5-year license that includes a few perks like early access to new features. That qualifies as a commitment, I’d say. Now I just need to stick with it.

Org-roam continues to impress.

I use org-roam's "Daily Notes" feature every day as a frictionless place to put notes that may or may not need to be moved or otherwise dealt with later. It's the Org-roam version of a similar feature in Roam.

One thing about it I didn't care for was that the Daily Notes .org files were starting to pile up in the root of my ~/org directory.

Most of the time, file names and locations do not matter in org-roam. Everything is easy to find/browse right in Emacs. There are times, however, when I'm poking around in my org files using Dropbox or the Finder. All those daily files started getting in the way, so I decided to try moving them into their own ~/org/dailies/ folder.

Trouble was, the way I get to or create daily files is by using org-roam-dailies-today and that function creates the file in the root org-roam-directory folder. I asked about the possibility of a new setting for where to store dailies, but it turns out that the capability is already in org-roam with org-roam-dailies-capture-templates. This is an org-roam specific version of the org-capture-templates feature. Jethro helpfully sent me the following snippet for my config:

(setq org-roam-dailies-capture-templates '(("d" "daily" plain (function org-roam-capture--get-point) ""
                                            :immediate-finish t
                                            :file-name "dailies/%<%Y-%m-%d>"
                                            :head "#+TITLE: %<%Y-%m-%d>")))

And poof! new daily notes files are created in ~/org/dailies.

But what to do about the 3-months worth of existing files? They are full of links to other org files and those are all relative to the root ~/org directory. Moving them would break all those links. I had seen some comments about proper link handling when files are moved using dired, so I tried that. I fired up dired, marked all the daily notes files using %m2020-, and moved them to ~/org/dailies. I then deleted the org-roam.db database and ran org-roam-db-build-cache and guess what, all of the links and backlinks were updated and everything worked.

Now, all my "dailies" files are nicely tucked away in their own folder.

So cool.

As you probably know, I struggle with where to keep my notes. For a few months now it's been a battle between Org-roam and Roam. Org-roam has been in the lead, mostly due to Roam being unstable and (soon to be) expensive. Also, my infatuation with Org mode is on again.

Using Emacs takes work on my part. It takes mental energy. I'm nearly always OK with that, because Emacs has Org mode and Org mode beats everything at what it does. On the other hand, sometimes I'm lazy or tired. I just want to lean back and point-and-click my way around. That's not how Emacs works. I wrote earlier that, "Getting to a link I have stored in Org-roam takes me about five seconds longer than the same link in Roam." In other words, Emacs with Org mode (and by extension, Org-roam) is better, but it's a lot harder.

Yesterday, I tried the Roam-alike, Obsidian. Obsidian could be, for me, a viable replacement for Roam. It looks good, has all the necessary features, uses local storage only (by default), and is based on Markdown. I played with it for only a couple hours, but I really liked it. It's easy! Well, crap. Now what?

I took a breath and thought about it. Honestly, Obsidian shifted the battle lines. Now, it's Org-roam vs Obsidian. I can live without block-level transclusion and queries in Roam. I can, reluctantly, live without an outliner. I can certainly live without founders I'm uncomfortable with.

But, I don't think I can live without Org mode. My ~/org directory has everything. It's not just my notes repository. It's my Journal, my todo list, my authoring environment, my reference manager, my time tracker, my PDF viewer/annotator, and sometimes my email and RSS client. I love the idea that I can ripgrep in ~/org and find anything. I love that everything always behaves the same way (bindings, editing, file handling, etc.). I love that it's all local and free and is more likely than any of the alternatives to be around for decades.

Yes, Emacs can be difficult and frustrating. It is a tweaker's dream and at the same time can be a nightmare for someone trying to just be productive. This is crazy-making if you're both of those people.

So right now, Roam and the other Roam-alikes will have to sit on the sidelines. I'm writing this on Friday, May 29, 2020. Just making a note.

It's been a challenging week for me using Roam. For the past several days my Roam database simply wouldn't load. I'd see the spinning Astrolabe forever. Deleting the site data in my browser and restarting would help for a time, but then it would happen again.

What I've come to learn is that I need my Roam database available to me all the time. I understand that Roam is still in beta, but here we are.

While I wait for Roam to figure things out, I'm back to using Org-roam. This means that I'm dependent upon Emacs for useful notes, and I was trying to avoid that, but at least I can get at my notes were something to break. You know, text files and all that.

I prefer "real" Roam, but Org-roam is pretty great, and is improving so fast it's hard to keep up with it. Of course Org mode is just so good anyway. Oh, and it's stable, so it's got that going for it.

I just learned that Org-roam supports aliases. This means that I can reference pages in my Org-roam database in more than one way.

For example, I might want to have a page for "World War II" but when mentioning it I would just use "WWII". It's done like this...

#+TITLE: World War II #+ROAM_ALIAS: "WWII" "World War 2"

This is really handy. Even "real" Roam doesn't support this as easily yet.

It's in the docs. I should read them more often.

A quick rundown the chaos in my head around Roam and Emacs and how it has affected my day so far.

6:00am Realize on the way to work that Roam just isn't a great idea for holding my (hopefully) long-term "second brain". $30/month forever in a proprietery blah-de-blah? Nope, and by the way org-roam is perfectly suited for this. I want long-term stability and control for this sort of thing and what could be more long-term-stable than Emacs and plain text files, right?

7:00am Tweak Emacs a little and settle in. Move some of the things I "accidentally" wrote in Roam yesterday into org-roam. You see? Now everything is in Emacs and I can stop thinking about it. This will be fine.

11:00am After spending 90-minutes down a rabbit hole trying to get better at managing tables in Org mode and then fumble-fingering a couple commands that messed up my file because my Emacs keybindings are a mess, I decided that NO! maybe Emacs isn't the best tool for the job and Roam is made for this, for crying out loud. Also, Airtable is great at spreadsheets, why suffer the pain (and admit it, it's painful) of tables in Org mode when I can just paste an Airtable link into Roam? Best tool for the job, yada yada.

11:30am Go to lunch and think about all this the entire time even though I just want to enjoy my damn lunch.

1:00pm Quit Emacs in anger and put all my notes from this morning into Roam and my tasks into OmniFocus where they belong. Right!? Tasks are way simpler in OmniFocus anyway and it hooks right into email and so on. My second brain is basically useless when it's nothing more than a bunch of text files. Notes need to be used to be useful. They aren't useful if they are just written once and forgotten. You know what makes my notes useful and is nice and easy to use? Roam!

2:00pm Realize I'm doing it again. I kind of knew I was, but now it's become obvious so I jump into another tab and start writing so I can share this nonsense with everyone because everyone wants to read post after post of me whining about how indecisive I can be.

The Future No one knows, the day's not over yet!