DeveloPassion's Newsletter #163 - Public Notes

Welcome

Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one 🤩

This week, I've continued doing what I could to improve the SEO stance of my Website. I'll tell you more about what I've tried below.

I've also booked my next vacation. I'm going to Rome for a few days at the end of the month. And it's going to be awesome, I can feel it. I need a few days off to change my mind, recharge, and think about the next steps.

I've also launched a cool new experiment: publishing my work notes...

Alright, let's gooooo 🚀

New experiment: Public Notes

This week, I have decided to publish a subset of my work notes. I've been collecting ideas and taking personal/work notes for years, but I have only shared those as part of my articles. After my keyword research exercise, I thought about the fact that my notes might be useful to others, as public examples of how I approach note-taking and knowledge management. Beyond that, I also figured that the content itself could be valuable to share. As an added benefit, those notes will be indexed by search engines, and might generate additional traffic to my Website...

For now, I have published ~2.5K notes, but I plan to share many more in the future.

You can find those here:

README - DeveloPassion

DeveloPassion

DeveloPassion

I published those using Obsidian Publish, which is also a way for me to support the developers of Obsidian. There are a few bugs/issues I need to iron out, but it's a start. Now, I can easily publish new and atomic ideas without having to care too much. Those remain my work notes, and as such they're unpolished, and forever imperfect.

So what did I do exactly?

• I subscribed to Obsidian Publish
• I created a README file to use as homepage
• I've published a few first notes from Obsidian
• I added a logo, and configured the site
• I've associated my Obsidian publish site with a custom domain
• I've added a publish.js file to add JavaScript code to my Obsidian Publish site. Thanks to that, I could add the Gumroad script and another for Plausible Analytics
• I added the folder note plugin to be able to add notes explaining what folders contain. Then I created notes for the most important folders I have decided to share. For example, this one
• I added the Waypoint plugin to automatically generate a list of what each folder contains. I used it on the specific folder notes. For example, this one
• I found a way to generate a changelog each time I publish new notes, as well as a list of recently updated notes

In addition, I worked around some important issues

• Obsidian Publish does not support Dataview queries. Those don't render anything. So I modified my Maps of Content (which used dataview queries) to hide those, but also to include a static version of the query results, which works with Obsidian Publish as it is actual Markdown
• Since I don't publish ALL my notes, my Maps of Content sometimes pointed to files that did not exist. To fix this, I added a new property to the notes I publish to be able to recognize those: "public_note". That way, my Maps of Content can filter out the notes that are not published. This creates new and interesting problems (both locally and on the publish site), but I'll tackle those later
• I also managed to display the tags of my notes, but the code doesn't work well, I'll have to look into that later on

I'm curious to know what you think about this initiative.

1K subscribers and only 7 paid members

This week, we passed the 1K subscribers bar for this newsletter 🎉

Meanwhile, there are only 7 paid members. The graph says it all 😂

Given that Ghost costs $25/month ($300/year) for maximum 1K members, we're at the upper limit. So, we're entering the next tier (max 3K members), which costs $40/month ($480/year). I have to think about whether it makes sense for me to continue this or not, given that this is just the visible price. The rest is the time I spend to work on it all...

The lab 🧪

Latest SEO efforts

As I mentioned during the last few weeks, my Website's organic traffic is going to s***, and I need to figure out why and what to do to fix it. This week, I've reworked the signature of all my posts, adapted post titles, meta descriptions, added and changed images on many posts, etc. Hopefully this will help, but I have to wait a few weeks before I can judge the results...

Also, I've learned more about keyword research, and spent two whole days researching better keywords to target in the future. Hopefully, that will help me recover some of the lost organic traffic...

2FAS

I've finally migrated my second factors to a new application on Android. I was still using the old and deprecated "AndOTP". Now, I've switched to "2FAS", which is open source, and quite cool.

2FAS - the Internet’s favorite open-source authenticator

Meet your favorite 2FA app. We are an open-source, community-driven, private and simple solution for Internet’s biggest threat - security breaches.

2FA Authenticator App (2FAS)Greg Zając

With this application, I was able to easily import my existing configuration. It has a much better UI/UX, and also has a browser extension that I can use to quickly retrieve 2FA codes from my desktop browser.

New articles

No new articles this week

Quotes of the week

• Wisdom is turning your future hindsight into your current foresight — Shane Parrish
• Knowledge is power, but keeping the knowledge is the real challenge — Bryan Tracy
• Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions — Lao Tzu
• Average competence plus action will beat superior talent without action every single time — Justin Welsh

Hey, by the way, most of the quotes I capture are available on my Website now!

Thinking and learning

It's always interesting to discover how others organize their notes. Eliott Meunier is a very interesting (French) content creator. I've been following him for a few years now. I recently discovered that he also shares a part of his digital garden:

Commencez ici - Le Jardin Numérique d’Eliott Meunier

Commencez ici - Le Jardin Numérique d’Eliott Meunier

Le Jardin Numérique d'Eliott Meunier

Are we going through an intellectual obesity crisis? I'd say that it depends. For some generations, I believe it's the case. For others, clearly not!

The Intellectual Obesity Crisis

Information addiction is rotting our brains

The PrismGurwinder

A cool presentation by Ivo Velitchkov, on the past, present, and future of PKM:

Another one:

And a related discussion:

How technology shapes our world:

Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy on how technology shapes our world | Aeon Essays

For Bernard Stiegler, a visionary philosopher of our digital age, technics is the defining feature of human experience

Aeon Magazine

An interesting presentation (in French), about how to organize notes:

You need a system:

How to Create an Elite Note Taking System

It starts by building a second brain to free your mind

The Bit ShiftBowTiedCrocodile

My Reliable Second Brain

The FOMO has disappeared!

Practice in PublicManav Tyagi

There are now literal digital gardens. Lovely ❤️