I’m doing JD at work, which means I have little flexibility in which systems I use and where I store stuff. My content, data and knowledge is very scattered, and there’s not much I can do about that. It’s early days in my JD journey, but the capability of the JDex to handle the distributed nature of “stuff” is already proving very helpful.
The way I’m doing it, my index is series of notes (“pages” in OneNote speak) - one per JD ID. If that ID is something that requires notes to be taken, I’ll put them in the index page itself.
But the crucial thing, as you’ve already noted, is that the index note also tells me where to look to find more information about this ID. That might be a direct hyperlink to a webpage or a document, or it might simply say “email” or “filesystem” - in which case, when I go to my email or filesystem, it will be organised or tagged by AC.ID as well, so I’ll easily find what I’m looking for.
The principle for me is that if I start in the index, it should point to everywhere else I have “stuff” relating to that ID, in whatever way will make the most sense to Future Me.
2 Likes
I like the idea of indexing the location, and think you should store them in the zeros. I’ve considered reserving a standard zero for this.
I’m about to free up categories 01-09 so you could use 01 Locations and then give each of them an ID. Allowing you to link to them from a note like so:
28.01 Holidays
Location: 01.13 Backup hard drive in the garage
– and now the backlinks at 01.13 will show you all the IDs that store a thing there.
This feels very graceful. I’ll do it for my own stuff as soon as I get time.
2 Likes
There’s a subtle ambiguity here: when we write something like “For more info, see 01.13,” do we mean go to that location or see the entry about that location?
I’ve come up with two possible solutions:
- Add a prefix to indicate the location, e.g., see
L-01.13
- Use a key to indicate the location, e.g., see loc:
01.13
In other words, the clarification could be encoded either as part of the identifier (a prefix) or as a key-value pair (inline or attribute-style).
What kind of solution would you recommend?
JD’s comment about reserving some of the standard zeros for location and backlinking is fascinating. Makes me want to think again about moving my JDex back from DevonThink and into Obsidian. Though I know I could do linking in DevonThink (haven’t moved to version 4 yet), this is cleaner in Obsidian IMHO.