Commonplace Books

When I recently realigned this site, one of the goals was to let me use this place to store thoughts more easily. The Bookmarks section handles this to a degree but, catering only for a link and category, it’s limited to fulfilling the role of a log. There’s no room for comment or other thoughts.

I’ve also been doing more reading over the past couple of years. There are always quotes I want to remember or refer back to: what to do with those?

After reading Permanent Record, I wrote a little post with a couple of quotes, but the Writing section of this site isn’t there to be filled with book quotes.

I’ve previously stored quotes in Notion, but it’s slow and private: all the reasons I wanted the Bookmarks area in the first place.

This is a long way to say I’ve been looking for a place to store links and quotes, possibly with a way to comment on them, too.

Inspiration

Despite the minimalist feel, Daring Fireball handles a stream of various content types pretty well. The archive supports long posts and short posts with refreshing flexibility.

How can I get a bit of that on here?

In an Unoffice Hours, Joshua Galinato brought up the idea of a commonplace book. Here’s been working on an app to store quotes and this sounds like perfect personal site material.

Looking up the origins, commonplace books (or ‘commonplaces’):

Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: sententiae, notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.

This sounds like exactly what I’ve been looking for: a place not just to store quotes, but to comment on them and write notes, too.

Format

For now, this site’s commonplace is split into two sections: Commonplace and Books:

• Books is a space to store quotes from things as I’m reading them: a place to quickly refer back to when I can’t remember the exact quote from an author.
• Commonplace is an archive of these quotes, along with commented links/quotes from online articles

At some point, it might make sense to pull Bookmarks and Writing into the Commonplace, so it becomes the ultimate archive for everything on this site.

Maybe.