Why I Blog and How I Automate it (2023)

Summary

Why I Blog and How I Automate it 2023-03-22 # Why I Blog I’m interested in consuming information in order to create new information (one of my motivations for pursuing a Ph.D.). I generally read articles/papers or watch videos, and then create papers/articles/code and have discussions as a result. While creating blog posts could be considered ‘giving back’, I think most of the benefit is personal because it (if well-written) forces me to make sense of and distill the ideas therein sufficiently such that someone else can understand me, which requires confronting various weaknesses and problems with the idea and improving on them (This is also one reason why I believe feedback systems are important). Other sources refer to this as the Knowledge Lifecycle, of which I’ve included a screenshot below (the image comes from A Complete Guide to Tagging for Personal Knowledge Management ( link) — they do a great job explaining this idea in detail which I won’t repeat). My Markdown-based Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) notes system, which I’ve been building for years and currently interact with using Obsidian, is a grounds for this. In a nutshell, this is my process: Organize how I ingest new knowledge. I usually learn from articles/blogs/papers/videos online and sometimes learn from books as well, but all of these, even finding out about said book, originate from a browser tab. I maintain different sets of browser tabs for different research areas in both work and personal pursuits and organize these using tools such as the awesome BrainTool and sometimes Obsidian. After writing this post, I created a read-it-later solution for this. ^85m76m Any high-quality paper/article/video/etc. I read and want to remember goes into Zotero and synced between laptops/desktops via Syncthing (and is annotated there for PDFs only) (#todo write a post on link rot and my interest in preserving digital information) Said annotations and links to the local Zotero file+URL are synced into Obsid...