I seem to be slowly gravitating towards Zettelkasten:

— I can’t write anything longer than a memory card

— I am a hypertext person, linking anything to everything

— And I slowly got to the point of needing memory supplements to exist as a writer

After reading https://blog.oddly-influenced.dev/2025/10/30/hypertext-zettelkasten.html I finally wondered if Zettelkasten might work for me. Except I don’t like the indexing talk and prefer exhaustive linking instead.

So my idea of Zettelkasten is a title-oriented sparse graph of short uncategorized HTML notes. And a tooling for managing these:

— Note appending script with Gemtext-like (or email https://aartaka.me/email-formatting.html like?) mobile-friendly text format (likely a Readline-enabled Lisp program, but it’s so simple it can be anything)

— OR a (JS-sprinkled) page on my website sending myself emails to process into notes afterwards

— Completion builder/indexer (an ed(1) script, basically creating a Readline completion file)

— A set of conventions for writing an index-less yet orderly notes (sloppy human language instructions)

None of these are written yet, of course. But with these in place, I can get to filling out my Zettelkasten and agonizingly realizing I don’t have much original thought and the idea was too ambitious in the first place.

@aartaka You might want to try using Obsidian before rolling a custom solution. I use some plugins, but I don’t think you’d require any to get started.

Or: the people who sell https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ have a style that may be more to your taste. Much more link heavy than separate indexes, and they don’t have the ceremony of the `17.1a3g` labels. (Neither does raw Obsidian.)

@marick I’m extremely wary of Obsidian, because it’s an isolated tool that focuses on Markdown too much. I don’t like isolated tools and Markdown 😜

I’ll check the ideas of The Archive people though, thanks!

@aartaka org-roam is very nice for that. You can make static HTML cards of custom style from the notes, if you want, and org-roam-ui draws a visual graph.

@akamar I’m already using Org, so I definitely shoud check org-roam out!

Y’all, I’m halfway done with my Zettelkasten setup. I have a

• website page that formats and sends me new cards

• build setup to convert my weird HTML into valid styled HTML5 cards

• my first card, of course talking about Sianne Ngai’s stuplimity—a central aesthetic concept for everything I do!

What I lack is a file indexer that’d go over the cards and store their filename and title in a separate place—to then be reused for index page and the card creation page autocomplete.

Did I tell you that it all can work without JavaScript and the build setup is just a bunch of ed(1) scripts?

(I’m doing things too fast, it’s like reverse yak shaving—I might finish all the setup today and start doing cards right away.)