Hi everyone, I’m not sure if this is the proper category or if it would be more relevant in Meta.
In any case, I have a question about the writing process once notes are taken. I’d like to define a clear and reproducible way to write as well as share produced notes/articles. So, this post is a bit of a mix between concepts and examples, I hope it’ll stay clear anyway.
I’d like to differentiate my finalized output from my notes and ideas, as such I was thinking that a writing/ folder separate from the org-roam/ folder is in order. Though drafts can live in a org-roam/drafts/ for example.
Notes/Articles/Books/… in writing/ should be final or close to final products I or others can read and understand, they stand on their own.
Does that structure make sense ? How do you differentiate those processes and organize your work ?
Now onto a more technical question. I want to share some of my final notes with colleagues or friends, code & graphs included but I also want to version control said final notes.
I should create one directory per project in writing/ and each project should live in its own git repo.
I should one git repo in writing/, one directory per project and each project is a gitsubmodule.
The third option seems more simple but not really scalable while the fourth seems more scalable but maybe difficult to maintain.
I’m also grappling with a similar challenge myself. I have taken a similar approach as you describe.
For what it’s worth, here is what I am doing – not definitive, of course; just sharing my experience.
Here is a rough illustration of my “folder structure”. This roughly follows the P.A.R.A method. I don’t know exactly where my evergreen belongs in PARA – it’s probably a special Area of interest.
Everything else, writing projects, journals, todo, and even data to support ideas developed in the evergreen folder are outside (data are facts, not ideas. Notes have outgoing links to their source data, so they won’t get lost).
Back to responding to your queries…
I have a project folder separately (using PARA’s idea). Each writing project has its own subfolder. I’m writing a book (a very thin volume), so this is a book subfolder under project (sames as your way)
Drafts go inside book (different to your org-roam/drafts way)
For me, notes/articles/books can belong to my evergreen, resource, or the project itself, depending on their nature (different to your way)
If notes that have ideas beyond the project at hand, they go to evergreen. If they are specific ideas for the book project, they become comments directly in the book’s chapter file, or a special “notes” file in book folder. If bibliographic information (.bib file) or a PDF version of the article/book, they are a resource. Images for the project go directly in the images subfolder under the project – this is because they are part of the book, and I would like to put them in git version management; also the editor needs to be able to check the image quality separately.
Just as a side note, I am experimenting with putting notes (of ideas beyond the immediate project) in a subfolder of org-roam-directory. I add first-directory to org-roam-tag-sources. For notes that orignate from book, I put them under book subfolder within evergreen. This way, these notes get the subfolder’s name (“book”) as a “tag” in the list in org-roam-find-file, etc. – for easy searching and filtering. The idea is, once the project is done, I “remove” the tags by moving the notes if they prove to be worthy of being part of evergreen, or archiving them if they aren’t good enough.
For the git question, I take your option 3. I just don’t know what git submodule does, and I don’t need to know about it for now. It’s just my lack of knowledge, really.
Just sharing what I am doing right now.
I would love to know what others are doing.
At the moment, my org-roam-directory has two sub folders: personal and work. Both are symlinks, so they physically reside somewhere else (so that they can be Cloud sync’ed by different providers).
They are both flat. I use tags sparingly as a category, or almost as a sub folder.
I only have a couple of categories (usually a temporary project like I said) because I cannot deal with many tags. Your example seems to have too many tags for me (not an issue or anything; it’s just my preference).
And not many notes have a category. Most of my notes have either work or personal only. It works as a good filter for me.
Okay, thanks, that’s interesting. For my part, I like to have some form of granularity in the roam_tags. I would like to explain why.
In my “roam” folder I have a “journal” folder, a “sources” folder and an “annotations” folder. All the other notes are in the root of the “roam” folder. Projects are for me something else because they are not atomic notes but an articulation of ideas, sources and annotations. This is often what I need when I want to move on to writing an article or a report.
So I have notes that are useful for several projects, which explains what I mentioned above. In fact I use the following type of tags which are always the first in my tag list:
“person”: related to a person
“project” : related to a project
“institution” : related to a company, association or structure on which I work
