Searching the ideal way to manage my personal knowledge
So we have just celebrated the New Year and I'm now trying to get a great setup for work.
Last year I gradually moved away from Obsidian, which had been my primary solution for managing knowledge. The main reason was the difficulty of using it across multiple devices. Their sync service was inefficient to handle conflicts and missing files, which occurred due to a security strategy of keeping my vault inside a VeraCrypt encrypted volume. Git Plugin was a great syncing alternative and presented no problem to me since I'm a power user but I ran into a serious limitations when trying to replicate the same secure setup on Android. As I couldn't install and use git properly in my smartphone along with encrypted volumes, I concluded that my Personal Knowledge Manager (PKM) should run as a web service.
I tried running Obsidian in a container using unofficial web server deployments, but the setup was fragile. Logseq was another option I had known for some time but they switched their storage strategy from a file-based system to a database, which doesn't fit my preference of using git and IDE to manage my content.
At the end of December, while searching for info about web access on the Obsidian Forum, I discovered Silver Bullet through a user suggestion. At first it seemed incomplete compared to Obsidian, but after taking a deeper look I realized it currently aligns better with what I expect from a PKM.
Silver Bullet Strong Points:
- Built as a Web Service and Container-friendly, was very easy to run
- Handles authentication, providing a necessary layer of security for those who want to access their deployment through the Internet
- Native query language, opposed to Obsidian that needs plugins to do so
- Fully Open Souce Software (FOSS)
It shares other functionalities that Obsidian have:
- a file based storage layer, which is very friendly to manage the same way as we do with code
- Extensible through addons (called plugs by the Silver Bullet Community)
- WYSIWYG live preview page while editing
Some functionality that currently I couldn't find yet on Silver Bullet
- Publishing options and how they could be managed within the app.
- A Notion database strategy to handle tables was recently implemented in Obsidian as Bases, I‘m not sure whether Silver Bullet has something similar implemented or if it’s on their Roadmap.
- In Obsidian, I had to use a lot of scripting to achieve a native behavior in Logseq which is to automatically aggregate content related to a page inside the page (i.e., pages with dynamic content loading). This seems to be a tracked feature because of this ongoing discussion
Well.. regarding to publishing, Today I discovered Write.as service and it matches what I’m looking for: simpler, clean pages with less distraction or intrusion. This aligns with my core values.
So this new year begins with some new cool tools to test. And it's only January 2nd!
Let's see what more will be uncovered to us in the next chapter.
Bye! Best Regards!