Summary
I absolutely love bookmarking just about everything from youtube videos, technical documentation, github repos, blogs, articles, ect. Since I’ve started completely over with a fresh new home lab I wanted a way to manage my bookmarks and a more effective and effencient way to process the information.
Old Bookmarking Method
The past several years I just bookmarked all my sites in Firefox and synced it with all of my devices. The issue with that is that it can become cluttered. Multiple folders and subfolders under each folder. I felt like I was wasting time bookmarking the site and placing it in the right subfolder, but also I had I hard time looking for the bookmark again. This caused me to hardly ever go back and look for those bookmarks. So I did some research and found a much better method to bookmark sites and process the information. I use a method similar to ZettelKasten and it has been working for me for the past 6 months.
New Note Taking System
I found my inspiration for this new method from several different YouTube channels that I will link at the end of this blog post. For those who are not familiar with Zettelkasten its a method of taking notes in a more effecient manner to help connect thoughts and ideas and store these notes approriately. The creator behind the Zettelkasten method used note cards and placed these cards in drawers with a very specific filing system to make it easy to refer to later when adding more notes to the collection. In my methodology I mostly dont use handwritten notes and instead I bookmark items online using my bookmark manager; Raindrop.io, and take notes using Obsidian.
Main Idea
There are two key components to my method. Idea Storage and Idea Factory.
Idea Storage
In this portion of my process I’m just storing the bookmarks for later use to read, sort, and filter. When I find something online and I use my Raindrop.io Firefox add-on to add the bookmark to INBOX folder. This folder just stores generally all the bookmarks that need to read later or take notes on later.
Idea Factory
The next step of my process is to read/watch the bookmarked sites in my Raindrop.io INBOX folder and take notes on the topic in my own words. This step ensures I’m mentally processing what I read and writing down the most important portions of what Im reading/watching and so I can reference later if needed. After reading/watcing the bookmarked item I filter the bookmark by either deleting it from my INBOX if already took notes on it or if I think I will reference it later I will add it to another folder in Raindrop.io. My folder structure in Raindrop.io is that I never use subfolders and I generally keep the folder names vauge that can cover an over arching topic or action. This helps to ensure that I will be able to find the bookmarked site again and to not “pigeon hole” my topic so much that it becomes hard to find them.
Obsidian
This is the tool that I use to store all my notes. I found several plugins/settings that have improved my use of Obsidian such as assigning key shortcuts, Templater (Created by SilentVoid), and Sliding Panes (Created by death_au), Obsidian Local Graph.
The setup works for me allowing me to focus what Im writing about in the middle and have the side panels to navigate related notes in the local graph, related tags, or use the sliding panes to simultaneously look at other notes I have taken. I don’t want to dive deep into my notes structure as I use a very similar structure discussed in the TrustedSec blog. I absolutely love Obsidians Local Graph to navigate to notes or topic related, but what I like more is seeing my thoughts and idea grow into this big web which can be found in the notorious Obsidian Graph. The graph shows the most linked topics in big nodes and the color scheme relates to the type of note stored on the system.
Raindrop.io
I use the Raindrop.io app as an add-on in Firefox to bookmark items. I also have the mobile and desktop app to view my Raindrop.io bookmarks wherever Im at so I can take notes on the go. As I previously mentioned in the Idea Storage section of this blog post I have an INBOX along with many high level folder topics that I use to store the notes I decide to keep.
