This site's organization
My mind has always preferred organize files in folders. I like having a sense of where things are, and being able to see at a glance all files that pertain to a particular topic.
Even though I use #obsidian, which pushes towards a tag-based approach to organization, I fight to keep things sorted in folders.
But especially now that I’m experimenting with publishing my vault as a website, the folder-based approach is really starting to show its limitations. Maybe this is the time that I try to embrace tags.
What might that mean?
Gaming
I think that gaming information will continue to live in a subfolder. I have some specific organization and workflows in mind, and I want that section to have a fairly rigid format. Fine.
Random Notes
Could random notes just live in the root of the vault? Gasp I’m really disinclined to have a folder with hundreds of files listed, but this might be an area where I just have to let go.
Maybe I just shouldn’t be looking at the file explorer in the first place. Instead of scanning the file listing, I should just use search.
Tagging notes will let me still link related information, and may even uncover connections that I hadn’t anticipated. That’s the ideal anyways, but it does sound neat.
Posts
If I end up moving my blog over here, my instinct is to have a separate section/folder for my blog posts. What is the difference between a post and a non-post though? Blog posts are generally elaborations upon my thoughts, but random notes can be that, too. Blog posts have more polish? That’s a weird metric to organize file location by.
I do want to keep a good quality RSS feed, which means that “good” posts will be included and most random notes will not. What I could do is, add a #metaRSS tag to the frontmatter of any notes that I want to show up in my RSS feed. I could even add a sidebar section to the site that shows recent posts, by filtering for that tag. This would even make it easier for me to push good random notes into the feed. I think I like this idea.
Tag navigation
Aesthetically, I don’t really like showing a list of tags on each page. On my current blog, I hide the tags but use them to choose and display a list of related pages. This is a little bit more subtle, and I like the approach.
I’m sure I could do something similar here, and I might have the flexibility to try some different approaches to displaying these connections.
Themed pages
Currently, if I have a bunch of pages with info about me, I would put them in a folder called /about and keep the files within organized. With tags, I could do something similar to the RSS and add a #meta-about tag to those pages. Quartz makes it easy to create a page for a single tag, and show a list of all pages that have that tag.
Or, honestly, I could just make a main “About” page and just list the pages that have relevant, further information. Not really sure which would be easier, but I have options.