How I Take Notes

This page describes the system behind the Sunken Archive — how notes are captured, organized, and connected.

Philosophy

The value of a note is in its connections, not its isolation.

I follow a loosely Zettelkasten-inspired approach:

1. Capture quickly — daily notes, fleeting ideas, bookmarks
2. Process regularly — turn raw notes into linked, permanent ones
3. Connect generously — every note should link to at least two others
4. Publish selectively — not everything needs to be public

Structure

The archive is organized into a few top-level folders:

Folder	Purpose	Example
Projects/	Active projects and endeavors	Web Development, Home Lab
Concepts/	Evergreen reference notes	Docker, Networking
Daily/	Date-stamped journal entries	2026-02-28
Resources/	Curated links and external refs	Bookmarks
Meta/	Notes about the system itself	This note

Tools

• Obsidian — Primary editor. Wiki-links, graph view, and local-first storage.
• Quartz v4 — Publishes the vault as a static site with search, backlinks, and graph.
• GitHub Pages — Free hosting with automated deploys via Actions.

Conventions

Frontmatter

Every note includes YAML frontmatter:

---
title: Note Title
tags:
  - category
  - topic
date: 2026-02-28
description: A one-line summary.
---

Linking

• Use [[wiki-links]] for internal connections
• Use [[Note Title|display text]] for custom link text
• Every note should link to at least 2 other notes

Tags

Tags serve as cross-cutting categories. Current tag taxonomy:

• #project — Active projects
• #concept — Reference/evergreen notes
• #daily — Daily journal entries
• #resources — Link collections
• #meta — Notes about the system

Finding orphan notes

Use the graph view to spot notes with no connections. Every note should be reachable from at least one other note.

Related

• Bookmarks — Tools and resources used in this system
• 2026-02-28 — Today’s daily note