ok, ok, since I came back to add a few more serious thoughts, I’ll slip this in first:
Obsidian has custom markdown extensions. These are like having the Ring of Power in your pocket, when you think all it does is make you invisible. Gandalf said not to use it, and you want to listen to Gandalf, but sometimes being invisible is really convenient. But, every time you put it on, Sauron can see you a little more clearly.
As I said, it’s not really fair because the Obsidian people are really good about this, but I would say the analogy applies, to a degree, to the temptation of proprietary features in general. Also of course it’s tongue-in-cheek because it’s not like you should never use proprietary features when they give you real value.
Yes. This relates to what I came back to say after a walk. I make some significant modifications to my JD system as I implement it. I’ve refrained from mentioning them to avoid muddying the water, but I realized maybe it would help illuminate the current topic.
It’s not really exciting stuff, just that I use a different ‘coordinate space’ than the double-decimal, four-significant-digit Johnny Decimal one. I have discovered in recent months that it actually makes a big difference if I structure my thinking visually, and so I use nested quadrants to actually lay things out in two dimensions. This means I have four options at each level, and given four ‘levels’ the lowest and highest IDs would be 1111 and 4444. I do plan on writing about this sometime, but it’s not important to understand right now: just that I have a different ‘coordinate space’.
Yet I’m still waiting with bated breath for the Small Business release. How do I plan to use it, then, if I can’t use the downloadable note templates? Add a metadata field jdid: 29.10 indicating which JD ID my internal ID or note relates to. This way I can still consult the documentation and ask for help in the forums, using the JDID.
This, will also, I hope, solve the problem of updates: if I maintain this mapping myself, I don’t have to worry about overwriting data. In fact, a script to just update this mapping would be easier/safer than a system to ‘inherit’ on top of my actual content.
The thing is, all the work Johnny and Lucy are doing, first with figuring out the Johnny Decimal system, and now with applying it to the business world, are incredibly valuable. I remember when I got a preview of what they were doing with the SBS I knew immediately I needed this as a business-manager-by-necessity. The format, though, is at odds with my notekeeping needs, but I’m hoping this solution will solve the tension.
In other words, I would consider the SBS, and supporting its development, worth the money even if I never actually ‘used’ it in the sense of instantiating it on my hard drive.
Just a final perspective: instead of worrying multiple Markdown variations, consider making a Dash docset instead. There’s a compatible Linux app. Your site looks way nicer, but there is something about having your essential documentation offline that really makes a difference. Relevant perhaps, since fighting distraction is also a theme on these forums 