ericax

Obsidian uses Markdown, and is not an outliner.

We should have cleared everyone from a few days ago, could you check your spam folder?

Yep! Block math is already supported and inline math is coming very soon.

We might provide a plugin in the future to achieve this.

Right now I think the closet thing is to use set up an encrypted folder with a third party app to use with Obsidian.

Thanks for the interest!

Not yet, currently most of our users bring their own sync (Dropbox etc.), so if you edit the same document in real time that might create conflict copies.

We're working on a sync service with end-to-end encryption (for convenience, completely optional), and we might improve it to support real-time collaboration in the future.

Notion is great, I used to want to build my knowledge base in it, but figured it's not future-proof enough for my needs.

And that's part of the reason we went on to build Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/), the local-first knowledge base app. Everything is in plain text Markdown.

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/zof4zCj.png

Just released 0.6.0 and here's a video for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAkJMHg-dGw

The private beta community has built cool stuff already: https://github.com/kmaasrud/awesome-obsidian

In private beta right now, looking to launch soon.

I built Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/), a local Markdown file based knowledge base app. It supports internal linking and graph view, and recently added multi-pane capabilities too. It's looking more and more like an IDE for your knowledge by the day, and it's quite amazing at that.

I also wanted Obsidian to be very extensible, and the private beta community has already started extending it and it's so cool: https://github.com/kmaasrud/awesome-obsidian

Did the same. Obsidian now in private beta: https://obsidian.md/

Obsidian is mainly about offline Markdown files, being link-centric, and being extensive (plugins). Give us a try if that sounds like what you need!

I've made a project that incentivize people to write every day by planting a tree on their behalf for every day they write a certain word count. I made it because I think too many apps try to keep writers writing by punishing them, and I want to try positive reinforcement instead. Unfortunately I don't think that works.

Writer's block is a real thing. As least it seems to me like one. There's no trick to bypass it every time. It's like fighting common cold: it's painful, but it will pass eventually.

You will continue to write if you haven't given up by the time inspiration strikes. It's a test of persistence, really.

While open source software really shines when lots of contributions work together and when everyone is polite, understanding, and well-reasoned, not every project is like that.

Sometimes it's hard or even demoralizing for the developer to handle all the feature requests that do not take into account the constraints. I've seen some GitHub issues like that and it's disheartening.

Thanks, I looked at the code later and confirmed that too. The visual style is very similar to MindNode, but it's rebuilt using d3.

Yes. Looks like the author made his own with D3 [1]. It does look very nice. I especially love the colors.

[1]: https://github.com/gera2ld/markmap-lib/blob/master/src/view....

This looks like really nice! Are you using a open sourced mind map rendering library, or did you write your own?

It visually looks really familiar, but looking at package.json there only seems to be d3. I've looked at a bunch of options for rendering mind map, so I'm particular curious.

Shameless plug: for bidirectional linking, check out Obsidian! We're in private beta: https://obsidian.md

Spaced repetition might also be supported in the future, but it's not as high priority as links. We also have a graph view for link relationship. Oh, and one thing different from Roam is that Obsidian reads your local folder, so you don't need to put stuff in the cloud, and you own your data 100% (if that's your thing).

Yep I did look at Joplin, but it seems internal linking is not their focus, unfortunately.

Gotta watch that, thanks!

As a reference book, the Planet Construction Kit is good and comprehensive.

Although reading reference books like this can be a bit dry, it helps you recognize the elements that an author makes up for his or her world when you see them.

Curious, why do you want to do that for your startup?

Is your startup a game studio?

Hard magic system sounds very interesting.

Although "unknown magic" and "ancient powers" are convenient, it bothers me to think there's no consistent system underneath it.

In the setting of the world, people in the world can view it as unknown, but the author is the god and should have a decent idea of how everything works.

I'd say Obsidian is very similar to Zim. Zim is probably the closest thing I looked at before deciding to make my own thing.

I wanted a few things that Zim didn't offer, such as a quick PDF viewer, bib/reference entries, audio notes (embeddable), and space repetition for term/definition pairs. I realize these needs are highly personal and they will be plugins that you can enable/disable.

I didn't love the interface but it wasn't a deal breaker.

There's no sync right now, the source of truth is your local folder.

P.S. When I read bidirectional sync I misread it as bidirectional links, which is something we're working on as well!

Yeah, I wonder why they decided on that as well.

The first time I learned about this syntax is from MediaWiki's internal link syntax [1], I wonder if there are any predecessors before them.

[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Links

Not sure I understand the first question, but if the topic itself contains "!", that's fine by the app, as long as it doesn't use the characters that the OS doesn't allow (like slashes).

The vertical bar syntax is also supported, so you can write [[Topic|display name]] and "display name" will show.

I usually leave punctuation out of the link, like `[[name]]'s`.

> Also do both types of links provide the same affordances? If I write [[Topic]] vs [Topic](topic.md) is there any semantic difference?

No semantic different.

UX-wise, right now [[ auto-completes from the list of files in your folder, whereas [Topic]( doesn't.

Thanks!

There are 3 main reasons:

1) At least to me, "[Topic](Topic.md)" is the most typical case, where the name of the link is the same as the file name without the ".md", so I feel like not repeating the title twice is better.

Markdown supports "[](Topic.md)" but IMO the syntax doesn't look as nice.

2) Easier to distinguish between internal links and external links.

3) Personally, I think "[[note]]" blends into the sentence better.

[[wiki style links]] are not as portable as standard Markdown links, I have to admit that. We will support "[A File](a-file.md)" as well for maximum portability, and possibility provide conversion utilities if you decide to move away from the wiki style link syntax.

World-building.

After reading about storytelling, I realized that I'm as fascinated to a well-crafted world as good plots and characters.

There's not much to read about, as a fiction world can contain as much detail as the real world. I'm spending time looking at the fiction worlds that I like and taking them apart.

As an exercise, imagining places and races is also interesting. You'll be amazed by the amount of details required to fill the gaps in order to "see" something in your head.

I don't use emacs, but I love the concept of organizing your notes and knowledge in plain text, so much that I made my own thing. It's in private beta right now [1], and I've been dogfooding it for the past two months and really enjoying it.

The graph overview may seem like a gimmick, but it's surprisingly useful in reviewing stale notes. Tracing semantic connection is more fun than just browsing a folder.

It's also super nice to be able to embed local copies of PDFs, images, and voice notes, so I know as long as I back up my hard drive, I'll never lose them.

Next I want to add plugins to do periodic reviews of notes, and maybe space repetition for term/definition pairs. Honestly, these efforts only make sense when the data is available for the long haul.

[1]: https://obsidian.md/

This. Being plain text is so important.

I don't use org mode because I don't use emacs, but I really like the concept of organizing your notes and knowledge in plain text, so much that I want to make my own thing. It's in private beta right now [1], and I've been dogfooding it for the past two months and really enjoying it.

I especially wanted to have a graph overview of all the links between the notes. It's also super nice to be able to embed local copies of PDFs, images, and voice notes, so I know as long as I back up my hard drive, I'll never lose them.

[1]: https://obsidian.md/

We had a similar incident with DO 8 days ago. It didn't kill our company, but we got hit hard.

Our business is Dynalist, an online outliner app. Many of our users store all their notes on Dynalist, so uptime is really important.

Starting 7 PM last Tuesday, we saw a slowdown in request handling. We filed a ticket with DO 2 hours after that (we also posted our initial tweet to keep our users informed: https://twitter.com/DynalistHQ/status/1131087411797270529).

A few hours later, we started to experience full downtime. Still no reply from DO. We filed another ticket with the prefix "[URGENT]". Still no reply.

We waited for 24 hours for their reply. We took turns taking naps because we're only a 2-person team.

After 24 hours, we tweeted @ DO (https://twitter.com/DynalistHQ/status/1131397013306847232). 2 hours later we finally got a support person working on our ticket. We didn't want to take it to the social media, but there doesn't seem to be any other way at that point. DO doesn't have phone support, and us "bumping" our support ticket didn't work either.

After 2 hours going back and forth on the support ticket and providing logs, DO's support person identified the issue and offered to move us to a less crowded server. They asked us what's a good time to do a manual migration if a live migration fails, and we replied immediately saying whenever is fine (we're experiencing downtime anyway).

We thought it's over, but we were so wrong.

They didn't reply in another 4 hours. That was 4 hours of more downtime. Sometimes, CPU steal is down a bit and our server could catch up some requests, although it would still take 10 seconds for our users to open Dynalist. But most of the time, our web app was totally inaccessible. Watching the charts on our dashboard go up and down felt like some of the hardest hours of my life... mainly because there's nothing we could do.

4 hours in, I realized we had to post another angry tweet to get a solution. There's nothing else to do other than trying to stay awake anyway. So I posted another tweet: https://twitter.com/DynalistHQ/status/1131497962184564737

This tweet didn't seem to work. Nothing happened in the next 3.5 hours and things started to feel surreal. I didn't know how much longer this downtime is going to last, and I didn't know what we were going to do about it.

At that time, it was 9:30 AM EDT and people were starting their day. We were getting more and more emails and tweets asking what is going on and where are their notes. A few customers were angry, but most were understanding and supportive.

At 9:55 AM EDT, DO finally did the live migration a few minutes before the time limit we gave them, which was 10 AM. That was the end of the incident; CPU steal was down to < 1% and Dynalist was finally up again.

However, we couldn't trust DO any more. This weekend we're migrating to a dedicated server provider which has phone and live chat support. DO is pretty good for spinning up a $5 box quickly to test something, but we learned the hard way we shouldn't rely on it.

Our postmortem post: https://talk.dynalist.io/t/2019-05-22-dynalist-outage-post-m...

How did you outsource customer support to other startups? And can I ask which startup?

Hi, could you tell me more about why you found it to be a to-do list app? Is it because of our headline[1]? Or is it because the examples we use on the landing page?

I'm asking because we don't see it as a to-do list app, as it can accomplish more and in different ways than traditional to-do list apps. Maybe we failed at delivering this message.

[1]: "Are you struggling to keep track of everything? Put them in Dynalist and free your mind." in case you don't remember.