Duly Noted

A Microblog of Encountered Ideas

About
Noted March 15, 2025

This site merges three distinct concepts into one execution:

  1. Microblog
    First and foremost, this is a microblog - a collection of snippets I find notable from across the interwebs.

  2. Personal Knowledge Management
    It is also my public personal knowledge management system. It’s more dynamic than republishing links on an RSS feed, and is loosely inspired by other link aggregators like StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and Pocket. All of which have shut down, hence this pet project.

  3. Commonplace Book
    Finally, it’s a online implementation of a commonplace book where I digitally “snip” articles, add my thoughts and post them here.

How It Works

I created a common-place-book API that allows me to send URLs I read, plus some personal commentary to an S3 bucket as JSON. I then process those JSON files into markdown files for this site.

Each entry keeps structured metadata using the isBasedOn property, which captures the original publisher, author, headline, and URL for each note:

title: "'my' title'"
author: "Commonplace Book Tools Bot"
date: "2025-03-29T21:26:14.552296" # timestamp when I captured this
generated: "2025-03-29T20:45:14-05:00" # timestamp when script ran
tags:
  - test
  - api
isBasedOn:
  type: "TechArticle"
  headline: "original `title` tag"
  url: "original url"
  author: "original url"
  datePublished: "March 20, 2025" # not always a timestamp
  publisher: "base url"
guid: "" # guid

Inspiration

I’ve created physical journals forever, why not a digital one? Ironically exploring this project with an LLM (Claude) taught me that I’m not alone in my desire to document the world around me.

This site especially borrows heavily from Simon Willison’s TIL and his collected quotations link blog posts.

A slightly self-involved concern I have is that I like to prove that I’ve read it.
— Simon Willison, 2024

Same, Simon, Same.

While building this project I found https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes, and https://notes.jim-nielsen.com which I find to be Chef’s Kiss. Both found via Simon’s main blog. https://thoughts.waylonwalker.com/ Is another great implementation I’m adding to this list.

It truly is blog posts all the way down.

Learn more about me at https://jsrowe.com/about.

Licensing

All content on this site is released under CC0 1.0 Universal - dedicated to the public domain. Use anything here however you want, no permission needed.

The source code is publicly available at github.com/jsr6720/duly-noted-jsrowe.