(In which we take a whack at translating this topic to the digital age.)

I suppose that most of you have been thinking “Yeah, but this app …” or “If you just scanned that …” or something along those lines. True. There’s always “an app for that.” (Sidenote: I just learned that, while Apple trademarked the phrase from their commercial, the trademark only covers using “the phrase in relation to retail store services featuring computer software and services.” Brian X. Chen, in “Wired” 11 October 2010, link.)

I mentioned Obsidian in an earlier post. I got there by way of paper-based note systems I learned in school. Then a long period of just making marks in the margins of my books as I read them. (Really interesting today when I come across a dated marginal note and I think to myself “I read this book 20 years ago? Got no memory of that happening.” But it also tells me that certain themes have been in my thinking for a long time.) Next, there were the years of laptops and my knowing that there had to be a way to use the computer to help with this, but not wanting to start down a path of, say, creating a database and having the software company die or – possibly worse – finding a simpler, better solution and feeling I had to copy everything over. Some time back, I thought I’d found the solution in Evernote.

Evernote does all kinds of great things for note-takers. One thing that really grabbed me was that it would sync my notes between devices. At one time users could sync several devices for free, say your work computer, your home laptop, and your phone. Same notes anywhere! Then, of course, the company saw it needed more income and cut free syncing down to two devices (which also kept larger groups of people, say a company or family, from doing this with a pile of devices). That was still okay with me because I wasn’t using Evernote for work or to share notes with anyone. And I could always copy and paste notes into email on my phone to send myself something at work, if need be. Clunky, but it worked. Finally, Evernote just started to get too feature-filled for me, the antipodes of their target power users.

I added Simplenote to my app collection. Also free. And I could sync my couple of devices. It is, as the name implies, simple. I use it to make shopping lists on my way to the hardware store or to make quick reminders to myself. Basically, I use it as a mid-term memory adjunct. Then I delete these notes. After finding that Simplenote was working for me, I started copying my reading notes out of Evernote to Simplenote.

A long process, yes, but it gave me a chance to do some typo fixing and to add keywords, or tags. It had occurred to me that the way Evernote seemed to be trending, they could either decide that everybody had to ante up for a monthly subscription, or they could be sold to another company that would take the whole thing in some other direction, or – worst case – they could just die and take my notes with them. In short, I was making a backup. At some point I got that done, but then needed to double enter any reading notes in order to keep the Evernote original and the Simplenote backup in step. This would have been easier if Simplenote had an API that could be used by IFTTT or Zapier or some other service that automates actions on the web. (If you don’t know those tools [both companies were founded back in 2011], here’s a sketch of how they work: say you are out hiking the Appalachian Trail and want your Instagram photos also to show up on your WordPress blog … rather than posting twice, you enter some information into, e.g., IFTTT about the two sites you want to connect; then describe the thing you want to happen; and from then on when you send a pic to Instagram it will automagically also show up on your blog. I’ve heard of somebody actually doing that.)

Anyway, the short of it is that a) my process was still taking up too much time; b) I was still concerned about a company making radical and precipitous changes (Anybody like me still sending out Tweets? No, I didn’t think so.); c) I was/am still nervous about putting the work into making all these reading notes and not having control over where they are stored somewhere out there “in the cloud”; d) I’m still concerned about software updates rendering my notes no longer readable or accessible; and e) I’m still cheap enough to think there must be free options available, or at least as free as making paper notes was.

That’s where Obsidian comes in.

It’s free software. Instead of storing your notes up on their servers somewhere, they’re stored on your own computer (so making the regular backup is on you). Your notes aren’t kept in some format that’ll be difficult to move to another platform, they’re text files – specifically Markdown files so you can easily input basic formatting that plain text files don’t allow for. If you need syncing, that’s possible. Linking notes to each other is really simple. Searching for that one note you need is also very simple. And, yes, you can use tags to collate notes (this is the 21st century after all). You don’t need an Internet connection to use it. Obsidian is one of those apps that can be either simple or complex, depending on what you need it to do.

My bibliographic references go into a note, each of the reading notes goes into its own Obsidian note. They’re linked to each other. No indexing needed, because it’s all searchable. Which means I can do this: search my whole commonplace collection for a term; among the results I spot a reading note that’s particularly apt; click back to the source bibliography info; see a list of all my reading notes taken from that source. And then click backwards through those steps to check other results. Or jump ahead with another search.

And in the end, for me, it’s just the tool I need to keep my Commonplaces handy, sortable, searchable, copyable … usable.

Commonplaces. Notes from your universe of sources kept in one common place.