Workflows

I'm on leave from work at the moment and I've taken the opportunity of the change of pace to re-arrange my reading and writing workflows.

For a while now, I've used existing tools or built my own to feed as much of my desired non-book reading as possible into my Pocket account. I wanted to only have to go to one place to find my "saved to read later" list, and Pocket conveniently has tagging functionality to organise articles, and an inbuilt "article view" that strips out JavaScript and CSS, leaving a simple text-and-images view of each article.

I've become increasingly frustrated with Pocket, however. It's slow, buggy, and due to a combination of Pocket's parsing engine and the various ways web markup can be written, sometimes the article view becomes garbled or foreshortened. Journal articles are particularly bothersome - titles not being passed through usefully, and PDFs auto-downloading. My Pocket list also tends, because I feed everything into it, to be a bit of a garbled mess of academic articles, website homepages, blog posts, videos, and whole ebooks.

Partially my move was inspired by Ashley Blewer's description of her workflow for creating her Illustrated Guide to Video Formats. She wrote of using the Joplin note-taking tool to sync image files between devices, and when I looked into it I realised that Joplin would help to solve some of my problems with my reading and writing workflows. I was also interested in tools that work on Linux, because I've decided my next laptop (whenever my Mac Airbook gives up the ghost) will definitely be a Linux machine. Most important is something I'd experienced but not really thought about enough to articulate. Pocket allows me to save articles and tag them with simple metadata, but not provide any further context or notes. With Joplin (synced via my Fastmail file space using webDAV) I can add a URL and title, plus any notes about why I thought it might be interesting. Later, after I've read it, I can add more notes, quotes from the article and so on. Then if and when I want to write about it later, I already have a bunch of context and notes about what I thought was interesting or noteworthy.

The extra cool thing about using Joplin is that it has a built-in Markdown tool. Given my blog, gemlog, and newsletters are all written in Markdown, this is pretty useful! Once I get into some habits I may well be able to copy and paste much of the newsletters and some of the blog and gemini posts, because I will have "pre-written" chunks. Essentially what I have now is a digital "commonplace book" where I can add whatever notes, links and other context I like about a particular thought or article, and add a bunch of tags as well. This is not a new concept (Evernote was one of the first successful examples) but I have never previously really seen the utility of this model to me.

The other thing I wanted to do was get the longer-form and non-html texts out of my browser and onto my Remarkable tablet, where they are easier to read (both due to less strain on my eyes, and less distraction), easier to mark up with marginalia and hightlights, and easier to organise.

So my workflow now looks something like this:

To read

Pocket - initial place to park things

Raven RSS reader - anything I'm subscribing to via RSS (mostly blogs and academic journals)

Remarkable tablet/app - article PDFs, ebooks, long reports and strategy documents

Bookwyrm - for noting published books I want to read

To write

Joplin - everything in a big Commonplace Book folder, with each note tagged depending on what I plan to do with it or what it is associated with (e.g. "marginalia", "gemini")

This is all pretty new, but I feel like it's working already at least in terms of me feeling less cognitive burden trying to remember everything I've "saved for later", what it was about, why I wanted to read or write about it, and so on. Hopefully this will inspire many future gemlog posts! 😀

Ashley Blewer's Archives of Tomorrow

Commonplace Book on Wikipedia

Remarkable

Raven reader

Bookwyrm