Leon Mika

Another random hack today, but this one sort of developed over the week.

It all started last Monday. I was doing an exploratory task around single-sign on. I read Scripting News that morning, and I was thinking about the style of writing Dave Winer has adopted for his blog: short notes made across the day, sort of like a running commentary on what he’s working on and what his thinking. I wondered if this would work for my job: having a way to write your thoughts down, even if they’re rough, so you can build atop them. Also works when you need to look back on what you were thinking or working on later on.

I’ve got an Obsidian vault for my work notes, and I do use the Daily Notes feature quite a bit, but it’s not conducive to the type of running-commentary style of journaling I wanted to see. There is this hosted solution, called Memos, which could work. It’s a bit like a Twitter-like blogging platform but with the ability to keep them private.

So that Monday I deployed an instance using Pikapod, and used it for my work. I did the job, in that I had a place to jot notes down as they came to me. But despite how well the app feels, it did have some shortcomings.

The first is the whole split-brain problem with having two places to write notes: where should I put a thought? Really they should go in Obsidian, as that’s where all my other notes are currently. And although I trust Pikapod and Memos to be relatively secure, notes about what I do for work really shouldn’t be on an external server. This became evident on Tuesday, when I wrote this note in Memos:

Something similar to what this is, except each note goes into the daily note of Obsidian. Here’s how it will work:

• Press a global hot key to show a markdown notepad
• Enter a note, much like this one.
• It will be written to the Obsidian daily notes, under the “Notes” header

Nothing happened Wednesday, but Thursday I decided to explore this idea a bit. So I whipped up something in XCode to try it out. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

The way it works is you enter a note in the top pane (which is just a plain text editor) and press Cmd+Enter to save it. It will appear in the bottom pane and will be written to the daily note in your Obsidian vault.

The notes are written to Obsidian in HTML. At the moment you also need to write the notes in HTML, but I’m hoping to support Markdown. It would be nice just to write the notes out as Markdown in Obsidian as well, but I want some way to delineate each note, and HTML seems like the best way to do so. Each note is basically an article tag with a date-stamp:

<article>
  <time datetime="2023-07-13T01:45:57Z">[11:45:57 am]</time>
  This is a pretty stupid app, but might be useful. Will save me the need
  to run that notes service.
</article>

But sadly Obsidian doesn’t parse Markdown content within HTML tags. That’s understandable, I guess, but it would be nice if this changed.

Anyway, we’ll see how this works. I’m calling this little hack Lava Stream at the moment, as an allusion to the geological meaning of Obsidian. And it’s meant to be a way to be an easy way of capturing thoughts, like a stream, of thoughts, into Obsidian… (get it?)

Like most Random Hacks here, I’m not sure how long I’ll use it for¹, or whether it’ll go beyond the pile of awful, crappy code it currently is, not to mention the ugly styling. I’ll spend more time working on it if I continue to see value in it. That’s not a given, but I think it shows promise. I’ve been thinking about something like this for a while, but the concern of storing work-related things on another server seemed like the wrong thing to do. Having a means of writing this way, with using Obsidian as the data store, seems like a pretty good way of doing this.