Building a knowledge base
knowledge-basewritingideasThis site is the public-facing layer of a knowledge base I keep for myself. The private side lives in Obsidian; the public side is what you’re reading. I had pictured something like this in my head for years — a slow, curated record of thinking I’d want to revisit — before I had a name for it. In 2024 I asked ChatGPT what systems people use for that kind of work, and one of the names that came back was Zettelkasten. It was reassuring, as it so often is, to learn that thoughtful people had been working on the same problem already.
PARA, in private
For organising the private vault I use PARA, Tiago Forte’s four-folder scheme:
- Projects — things I’m actively working on.
- Areas — ongoing responsibilities (home, medicine, software, church).
- Reference — material that supports the others. This is what gets published.
- Archive — everything else.
Each folder represents a state a note is in, not a topic. A piece of writing moves between states as my relationship to it changes.
Reference, in public
The Reference folder is run as a small Zettelkasten — short, atomic notes that link to each other. My intention is to publish it as a public knowledge base: useful to me, perhaps interesting to my children if they ever care, and occasionally helpful to anyone else who wanders through.
On this site the Reference layer is split into three streams:
- Essays — longer pieces I’ve spent time on.
- Notes — atomic thoughts, statused so you can see what’s half-baked and what’s stable.
- Library — the books, tools and other sources behind any of the above.
The capture inboxes — Apple Reminders, Apple Notes, paper notebooks like Moleskine — are upstream of all of this. Nothing on the site is captured here; everything is curated from elsewhere.
Why publish
The garden is the part you’d be wise to keep private. The Zettelkasten — the curated, footnoted, slowly-tended layer — is what I think is worth showing. Publishing it imposes a small useful discipline: ideas have to survive being read by someone other than me before they can stay.