www.mechaelephant.com VS Skeleton

For me, the idea is sound but the implementation always seems so cumbersome. I want something that separates the data from the display as much as possible, has an easy 'note taking' and has an easy install. One problem I always encounter is that if the interface to add notes has too much friction, I stop using it pretty quickly.

Anyway, so I created something over the weekend called 'notenox' [0]. It creates a a JSON file of relevant information, one JSON file per note, with keywords and a "special" keyword prefix called a 'title' that mimics how I've actually been taking notes (email, so the 'title' mimics an email thread). For display, I consolidate all JSON files into a single JSON file and then have it loaded into the browser with some Javascript to group by title or keyword, along with doing all cross referencing and counting on the client end.

Creating notes is done through the command line, because that's a common way I interact with my computer, with different options to create titles, links, keywords, etc. I'm sure there are many different Zettelkasten implementations out there but they always seem so clunky and cumbersome. It's not hard, so the simple use case should be simple, nor should it proprietary or locked behind a SaaS.

You can see my personal notes in action, if you like [1] (sorry, not mobile friendly!).

[0] https://github.com/abetusk/www.mechaelephant.com/tree/releas...

[1] https://mechaelephant.com/notenox

It uses Skeleton https://github.com/dhg/Skeleton which is a billion years old.

To get styling out of the way, let's download Skeleton CSS, unzip all the CSS files into the src directory, and import all the .css files in the App.css main stylesheet in the project:

Skeleton - 18K⭐ - Last update: December 2014 (Wow! Since 2014!)

Latest stable version: 2.0.4 Github stars: 18.3K Development: without activity for 7 years Long of active development: 1 years Active maintainers: 0 Contributors: 25 Number of commits: 167 License: MIT Used by: 0 Github projects Git repository: https://github.com/dhg/Skeleton

dhg/Skeleton - Skeleton: A Dead Simple, Responsive Boilerplate for Mobile-Friendly Development

So I decided to start with Skeleton. The downside with Skeleton is that the GitHub project is not active anymore. The last release was in December 2014 and there are open PR’s and issues. But besides that it was quiet easy to integrate and customize. Skeleton worked quite well, but the point that the project is not active anymore made me switch to Milligram. Milligram also provides a minimal setup of styles for a fast and clean starting point. So it was easy to adapt my design and switch to Milligram.