Jacob's Blog

Although the last post in the series assumed you had already set up a hugo site, I wanted to quickly go over setting up a website so that you can quickly get your wiki deployed. Before anything, make sure you BACK UP YOUR NOTES. This is the most important part of the process, since you will be using those notes later on. I would recommend Nextcloud, since, although some tiers require payment, some are free, and since your files are just plaintext, they are fairly small compared to images, videos, or music files.

As you might have heard by now, Org-roam recently updated to version 2, which allows you to set an ID for a post and a headline, and then link by those IDs. However, several functions were renamed to be more consistnt with the rst of the org-roam. This is a PSA to anyone using my hydras for Org-roam that you will need to edit those functions slighly for functionality. In jh/find-org-roam-file, you will need to replace org-roam-find-file with org-roam-node-find, and in jh/org-roam-insert, replace org-roam-insert with org-roam-node-insert.

I’ve recently been playing around with Org-roam, a note-taking package for Emacs and Org-mode based on the Zettelkasten method of taking notes, and interconnecting those notes by means of backlinks, and one place this style of note-taking is very common on is the Roam Research website. In the little bit of time that I’ve gotten to try this line of research, I’ve found it much more helpful with regards to actually remembering things rather than my old method of just writing it down in a notebook - having backlinks where I can go back and reference any information I’ve gotten is very helpful.

Although I briefly describe my workflows in the notes section of my website, I wanted to go far more in-depth here on my blog vs. in the notes file. I think of it this way - a note is a quick reminder of something, while something like an article or post is more in-depth. I use org-mode for most of my stuff now - if I am writing a README as an example (or writing generally), I’ll use org-mode where I can, including in emails.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that I use Hugo as a static site generator. Not only is it fast, but it is also incredibly customizable, which is something that I find useful considering my website has so much stuff on it. In addition, being able to create shortcodes to avoid reusing code on certain pages is such a helpful tool for wikis. Finally, having support for Emacs' Org-Mode is what initially drew me to Hugo in the first place.