Colophon

Colophon, a fancy term for sharing information about the publication of this "book". A way to track the thinking behind the evolution of this site.

What is this?

Vannevar Bush writing in 1945 imagined a device he called Memex as

a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

Decades later and there are systems (e.g. Obsidian and Notion) and concepts like personal knowledge management which echo this vision. This is my attempt to build my own Memex using Foam.

Why?

I needed to get better at learning. At obtaining information and learning effectively by working into sensible schema that I could use. Prior approaches were disconnected and ad hoc.

See this blog post for more.

What?

Version 2.0 - Foam + Material for MkDocs

Version 2.0 combines Material for MkDocs - to improve the user-interface for navigation/reading - with the Obsidian/Roam/Notion type authoring/curating functionality provided by Foam

Timed with an increased focus on leveraging this site for my personal learning environment

To do list

• publishing-graph-interface
• integrate-backlinks-automatically-onto-pages

Other examples

Random examples of what others have achieved using Foam combine with other technologies

• Foam-document - Foam site supporting to the foam/mkdocs template
• DevBook - using Just the Docs - Jekyll
• Paul's Digital Garden - uses the PARA method and a Gatsby theme
• lzrd.dev - 11ty with foam, pages include backlinks

History

Version 1 - Initial implementation with Foam using PKM (July 2020)

• July 6 - Early design

Version 2 - Adding mkdocs - (2^nd half 2023)

• August 20 - why-mkdocs-foam
• August 26 - deploy-with-github-action
• November 11 - tags-and-properties

Support

• Foam discord