Now that I’ve separated out the public and private repos and I’m a bit more committed to moving forward with Logseq for my public notes for a while, I’m thinking about how to use properties and indicate relationships.

I would kind of like to figure this out earlier so I don’t have to do too much retroactive editing down the line, especially if I’m going to pull notes over to this new system slowly.

It’s essentially a debate between the convenience of using properties and the “pureness” of using the ->

The default would probably be to use the properties for “basic” things like indicating the date and location of a note, but then any “contextual” linking between notes would be done with the ->

The argument for going all in on the -> would be to put to the test the idea of building relationships through “natural semantics” supplemented by this one -> character

This would look like this:

Many restaurants in NYC are small

example ->

Mura is small

Authentic Szechuan is small

supports ->

Big cities have small restaurants

<- informs

I’ve been to a lot of restaurants in NYC

part of ->

claims

But this doesn’t give an example of a situation where I would be tempted to use properties. I think time, location, and general tags are the only things I would be tempted to use properties for.

Time and location are interesting, because they are data about the writing itself, not about the idea I’m writing about.

A “general tag” would essentially be saying: when I think about x it would also be useful to keep in mind y (in both directions).

This could be done with the following system

The real reason to use properties is to make it easier to process something so Hugo sees it out of the box…

Let me think about this…

Do I need tags to be visible to Hugo?

I don’t think I need tags to be visible to Hugo right now

Worth noting that Logseq is saving the created and updated time for each block, and those are visible to Hugo from my script.

So it’s mainly a question of tags and location, and whether I want the time to be visible at the top level.

Currently I like the idea of continuing the time as the text in a block that identifies a certain “session”. Then that session can be in -> a location.

Pretty happy with using the tag -> formulation as well.