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Short Thoughts

📓📝 About a month ago, I started keeping a commonplace book to capture interesting things I come across online. Originally, it was in Scrivener on my desktop, which is my primary machine for work and for my writing.

But I also do a lot of my leisure-time online reading on my laptop, and my Scrivener commonplace book wasn't in the cloud. At first, I'd save links to interesting articles to Apple Notes, and put them in Scrivener the next time I was at my desktop, but that got old really fast.

So I've moved from Scrivener to bookdown, which generates an HTML book from Rmarkdown that I can peruse locally from my browser.

My commonplace book, via bookdown

Bookdown is overkill; I don't need any R functionality, nor do I need to generate the book in PDF or EPUB, or any other format that bookdown supports. Probably mdBook would have made more sense. But R and the RStudio IDE are already on both my laptop and desktop, and it's nice to just create a new Rmarkdown file and press "Build."

Now I can add to my clippings from either machine, and keep the book synchronized with a private repository on GitHub. And I can read it from both places, too, which is a bonus I hadn't been planning on when I started this practice.