Barnsworthburning
A very impressive ‘wiki’/‘zettelkasten’/‘directory’ - not to be missed if you’re into FedWiki or Andy Matuschak’s notes.
Directories aren’t surging. There isn’t this nascent directory movement fomenting - ready to take on the world. Directories aren’t trending.[1]
But there is a certainly really sweet little directory community now. From the Marijn-inspired stuff listed in Directory Uprising to the link-sharing ‘yesterweb’ collected around sadgrl.online - or the originals at Indieseek and i.webthings.
Barnsworthburning (by Nick Trombley) is a very formidable addition to this commuity - a clean, multilayered design and an innovative bidirectional index.
I know it bills itself as a ‘commonplace book’ or ‘Zettelkasten’ - I like to view it through the lens of a personal web directory - simply a collection of links and knowledge that acts as a portal to other things.
To the author, it’s a box to store things. But to us it’s a way of finding the vital pieces of this beautiful disastrous Web - which becomes more beautiful and more disastrous by the day!
Some of the entries are links with summaries; other entries are quotes and excerpts from larger articles.[2]
Oh but what sets BWB apart is this triptych view.
The left is an index of tags and creators. The center contains the entries beneath the selected tag or creator. And the right-hand side shows details for related articles and entries that link back.
To use the detail pane, you click on any of the attached excerpts or bidirectional links at the bottom of an entry.
Sometimes these excerpts are fragments inside of a larger entry. For example, here ‘Its place in the web of nature’ is linked to ‘crafting repair’ - even though its just attached to ‘A Pattern Language’, the book the thought comes from.
This also gets used to group together metapages - such as the (basically) ‘about’ page.
I’ll leave it to you to explore now. I feel like we could see some really interesting riffs on this setup in the future. It’s great.
