Nascent attempt at using Foam to curate and leverage a personal memex
post_title='Integrating Zotero into Foam'
layout="post"
published=false
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category="memex"
The next stage in setting up (Memex)[https://djplaner.github.io/memex/] (previous step) is to figure out if and how I can integrate (Zotero)[https://www.zotero.org/]. Zotero is how I manage citations (mostly) to the academic literature. It’s a bit part of how I seek information (browser plugin to save stuff I come across), make sense of it (highlights and notes), and share (managing references for publications).
Integration with Memex is intended to
In terms of the second aim, I’m wondering if it’s possible to integrate/replicate my Zotero library into Memex. Perhaps with networked wiki-link style connections to the refined notes.
summary here
Next steps might include
Necessary steps to the stated goals seem to include:
There were times when github-pages was failing to build memex - Page build failed
. Something in the naming or content of the markdown files wasn’t playing nice. The issue is that github-pages doesn’t provide any indication of where the problem is happening.
The solution is to test the github pages locally with Jekylly. For some reason, this took me quite some time to set up. In the end, the process was
Together this quickly identified the two problems
Problem fixed.
Zotero has duplicate detection which supports merging duplicates. It’s a slow process. Largely done.
Due to a work change, I’m commonly using two computers: Linux (personal) and Windows (work). I keep Zotero on both but I’ve been lazy. They are separate repositories. Semi-sync’d by Zotero but I’ve exceeded the space limits (without paying) for files.
Time to see if there’s an alternative.
WebDAV is known to work. ut the known WebDAV providers are a bit limited.
Another, more likely alternative, uses linked files, the ZotFile plugin, and some Cloud drive service (e.g. Google Drive).
My free Google drive currently provides 15Gb of space. Currently Zotero is storing 3.7Gb of PDFs.
ZotFile also provides the capability to extract highlights and annotations from PDFs into notes in Zotero. Potentially useful for later steps here.
Time to follow this tutorial for setting up Zotero with cloud storage and ZotFile.
Configure on windows
COnfigure again on iPhone
Pyzotero is an API client for the Zotero API
From the basics I’ll need a API key and my userid. Save those to the memex.toml
file.
The API uses “paths” to access data start with /users/<userId>
and then add
~/collections
~/collections/top
~/collections/<collectionKey>
~/collections/<collectionKey>/collections
- sub collection list~/collections/<collectionKey>/items
- items in that sub collection~/items
- all items, excluding trashedThe simple PyZotero test works. So what from Zotero would be nice to have in Memex?
The plan is that these are automatically updated via Python scripts that are run periodically. I just keep using Zotero for various tasks and it get integrated into memex.
The publications page on memex is now being built using a Python script that
e.g.