Joplin

For continuity of my experiment I felt I should mention that I have migrated from Joplin to Obsidian.

In fact, I migrated about 2 months ago now. So, as far as my journey into building a notetaking system is concerned, I’ve been using Obsidian for almost as long as I used Joplin (which was about 3 months).

I haven’t felt like writing a comparison of these apps, as I did when I moved from OneNote to Joplin. But I do want to point out the 2 main reasons I made the switch to Obsidian.

TL;DR #

I made a RandomNote for Joplin button for macOS. You can find the bash, python and AppleScript concoction here.

Apologies to non-macOS Joplin users, I have not made any other verions of this.

But if you like sticking things together, the bash and python elements could be of use to you…

What’s RandomNote? #

I discovered the concept of “RandomNote” via Tiago Forte’s PARA series. To describe it at surface level: he created a button that opens a random note from his Evernote notes.

The purpose of such a button is to aid in serendipitous rediscovery of your old notes. That’s not going much deeper, to be honest. To see what inspired me into action I encourage you to read Tiago’s post about it. He has a way with words which I do not.

The rest of this post is an extension of the “API / Automation Friendly” criteria from my OneNote vs Joplin blog post.

As explained in my previous blog post, I have started an experiment on my notetaking methods.

Before I had the idea for that experiment I dived into using Microsoft OneNote, because I was so excited to try out P.A.R.A.

I did that because I’ve used OneNote in the past, so it was familiar. But, within a couple of days of falling further down the P.A.R.A. and Zettelkasten rabbit-hole, I changed my mind.

I found Joplin.