TIL ("Today I Learned")

TIL^[1] ("Today, I learned") is my experiment creating a public "Digital Garden" for exploring and sharing content in passion areas.

The 🗺Map of Contents lists the content of the site, including topic areas, blog posts, articles, and blog-chains:

• 🛠 Productivity (GTD and PKM)
• 👨‍💻 Coding
• 💻 Tech, SAAS, B2B
• 😇 Advising
• 🔥 FIRE
• 👨‍✈️ Aviation
• 👨‍🎓 Business Education
• 🏔 Mountaineering
• 🎮 video games & 🛩flight simulation
• 🏍 Motorcycling
• 🏕 Camping
• 🏙 The PNW (Seattle, Portland), NorCal (San Francisco), and Santa Barbara

Why do TIL

• Extravert my ideas, thoughts, and have a place from which to store them
  • Maybe implement comments on my pages so as to gather feedback and learn from others
• An alternative to social networks that is controlled by a centralized profit-motive entity. I can provide personal updates via periodic posts and available via Subscribe and get new posts via the RSS/ATOM Feed.
• A place to synthesize learnings into /articles/ that may be useful, helpful, and/or interesting to others.
• Exercise and develop writing skills.
• "Learn In Public"
• Per 23 Reasons to Write online:

Write to dispel the curse of knowledge, to find your people, and to become.

How TIL

Infrastructure Stack

This entire website is built using the following:

• Pages written in Obsidian
  • on my laptop
  • on my desktop
  • on my phone
• Obsidian's Digital Garden Plug In
  • (running in a second vault from my main PKM content.
  • Which Requires a GitHub Repo/Project
  • Which is integrated with Vercel and Netlify
    • which builds a site using 11ty
• My site is registered with Google Domains

This setup allows me to write and publish content right from within Obsidian.md which could be on my laptop, desktop, or mobile phone.

💡 More of my tools, services, and media preferences can be found on Uses

Content production

This is all an experiment, and like others, it will someday be over, and abandoned, to be replaced by the yet another experiment, or like all things eventually, the void.

Although I intend to focus primarily on the bulleted passion areas above, as of 2023-03-01 I'm still working on building pages for each of them, all of their associated meta data, and making sure the infrastructure and my writing environment are working well together.

• The writing style I hope to achieve is as one explaining a new topic to a friend at a coffee bar, or an older relative.
• I will try to prioritize linking to external references (eg to a company's website) rather than recreating content that could be found from more direct sources (a company's website or Wikipedia) unless I already have my own page on the referenced entity.
• I will avoid creating pages about specific people unless they are a historical figure, a famous person, or public figure.
• I will try to update content on a regular basis either by creating new notes, updating notes, or modifying the backend templates, scripts, etc.
• I may end up organizing different content types as follows:
  • longer (1,000+ word) pages of synthesized and interpreted facts will be placed in /articles/ folder and/or tag
  • Personal updates are placed in a daily note ("2023-02-23") in a /posts/ folder and/or tag and published to posts.
  • The remaining content is expected to be one of reference-like content stubs, about pages, or meta-pages like the "Map of Contents"

Feedback

As of right now, I do not have a feedback mechanism other than Google Analytics, so the best way to discuss content with me is via The Fediverse on Mastodon.