How to Zettel
Notes on how what this site is and how I (plan to) maintain my Zettelkasten. Very meta.
What is the Zettelkasten method?
Zettelkasten method is basically a way of maintaining notes with connections between them. Kind of like a graph of atomic notes.
There are plenty of docs explaining the zettelkasten method so I’m just gonna link to them here.
Tools to create your own Zettelkasten
Note taking apps like:
The above two do a pretty good job of letting you make notes with connections between them and even explore those connections with pretty graphed views. Which one you choose is a matter of personal choice. I went with Obsidian because its free and it looks prettier. neuron is pretty cool for publishing but it kinda looks ugly.
Publishing your Zettelkasten
To publish these notes on a static website for ease of sharing, we will need a static site generator. I went with Hugo because:
- It uses markdown
- I like its templating system
- It is fast
For this website, I am using a heavily modified version of the PaperMod theme. Most of the changes I made are very hacky. I added support for:
- MediaWiki style links
- Backlinks
- Graph mode on the home page
Using Hugo with Obsidian is also easy, just make a new Hugo site and open an Obsidian vault in the content directory.
Deploying Hugo to GitHub pages is pretty easy. Just make a GitHub repo in the public directory (or whatever your build directory is) and setup Pages on GitHub.
Private Notes
If you wanna keep a few notes private, you can just set the following in the front matter of that note to make Hugo ignore it.
---
publish: false
---