Logseq Times 2023-01-29: CRM + On this day + Query walkthrough, 1 vs multiple graphs, plugins

The winter rains in the Middle East seem to have passed and with the rain comes a bit of cleaning.  There is little better than sitting by the window on the sofa looking out to see the rain and hearing the sounds of it as it beats against the window.

I think it really is the small things in life which can make such a big difference. We should all take a little moment out of every day to appreciate the life around us. As cliche as it sounds, it absolutely is a case of growing from the inside and being at peace with yourself = growing externally and the universe will come at you with more of the same. No, I have not just finished reading "The Secret", just a bit of light reflection for this sunny Sunday morning.  

With that being said, let's see if this week's episode can help us grow our Logseq usage.

Logseq News

• This week Logseq reached 20k stars on GitHub. A very impressive achievement.  A star basically represents that other people like the project and have "bookmarked" it and follow its development.

• It is now possible to convert a subset of a Logseq graph to a #RDF file. I will not pretend to say I understand what this means but kudos to the team as it was well received by users.

Releases

Although we have not had any new updates in a couple of weeks as the team was taking some time off, I am sure they are hard at work improving and working on cool new things. Stay tuned for more details.

The latest release of Logseq is 0.8.16, which can be downloaded here. For Android (Download the latest .apk) and for IOS, you can download or update Logseq from the AppStore.

Logseq In The Wild

Wanting a CRM-type system within Logseq so that when you run a query, you can get results like the one below. Well, Siferiax11d has us covered in this great post.

Here are some queries to be used with a CRM workflow. The queries assume the following.

1. People have their own pages
2. People pages start with @
3. People pages have a page property contact which lists a contact interval. E.g. weekly.

Great set up and will be looking to implement it into my own workflow.

I recently posted a quick Guide to creating an "On This Day" type feature in Logseq. You will be able to see historical journal entries made on this day 1, 2, 3 etc. years ago.

For the query, about how I set it up and how it works, please click here.

A few users provided their own tweaks in Discord, so please do take a look.  

I thought it would be useful to remember that the Logseq team is working on a new website, so please bear with the team if you spot something. I am hoping the new website will be live soon.

Also in terms of the life cycle of a new feature in Logseq, this is generally as follows:

1. pre-alpha: internal team testing
2. Alpha: for sponsors only
3. Beta: for backers and sponsors
4. release: available to all users

Whiteboards and Sync are currently in the Beta phase. If you want to use such features now, you need to be a Backer or Sponsor via Opencollective.

@sundar mentions that, so far I like Logseq for journaling, note taking and tasks. I use it on my Mac, iPad and iPhone with the sync that’s in beta. The features that would make it more compelling are:

1. Plugins on mobile and iPad
2. Quick capture on mobile snappier, like drafts
3. Native calendar events interleaved with tasks, like Amplenote.

I might not use any other new features from this point onwards.  Is there anything that you would like to see implemented in Logseq?

I thought this was a great concise explanation of what an outliner is by @Luhmann:

Outliners store information hierarchically. As in:

- Topic
 - Sub-topic
   - sub-sub topic
- Topic

You can nest paragraphs in any text document, such as word or Obsidian, but the order in which you nest information does not matter. However, for an outliner it does. For instance, if you tag a "topic" item (as above), the children of that item will show up in your Logseq queries for that tag, which can be very useful.

Outliners also have functions which make it easy to move where items appear in an outline, and to zoom in on a sub-topic so it is hoisted to the top level, allowing you to focus on that node, etc.  An outliner is also something of a database, in that each item has a unique identifier and can have individual properties associated with it, which can be easily queried.

In Logseq you can also use Document Mode to have a type of long-form writing experience by pressing esc (to exit edit mode) then t + d

Great thread and comments on plugins:

Thank you for posting.

Question: New to Logseq, I want to utilize it on my work machine for task management and meeting notes, but also use it as a personal/private journal/scratchpad. How can I access my kb without it living on my work device?

Answer (among many) I have maintained two separate graphs for a little over a year now. My work situation makes it absolutely essential that I keep these "firewalled." Since I access my work machine over Citrix, I can literally have both instances of Logseq side-by-side on the same screen even though they don't share data.

The biggest benefit? Never worrying that company confidential data makes it to my personal graph. I don't even refer to my company by its proper name in my personal graph. It has a codename.

The biggest drawback? Where does the knowledge go that I want to keep post my career with this company ends? When in doubt, my personal graph. This means almost all learning, tech research, etc. happens on my personal machine.

The main thing that I had to do to make this work well was to set up the exact same templates and workflows on both machines.

Perfect? Not even close. Does it work for me? 100%.

Zoom on iPad - Hello, is it possible to Zoom in and out on iPad? I found letters are super small on mobile. But I haven’t seen this functionality on iPad.

In the mobile app, it's possible to increase the font size by editing the custom.css file found in the settings menu. Try adding

:root {
  font-size: 18px !important;
}

This is based on an answer found here — https://discuss.logseq.com/t/basic-ui-settings-e-g-font-size/2946/26 — which also has more details.

I thought the contrast in a couple of tweets was quite interesting:

What are your thoughts?

OneStutteringMind shows us how we can use Logseq queries to retrieve information.  After watching this video, I did think (simple) queries are actually not that hard. Thanks Dario!

Bas Grolleman@ToolsonTech is currently digging deeper in the Logseq Vim Plugin, step 1, have a proper cheatsheet. Check it out here.

Beth writes about a masters student’s reading workflow in Logseq

A TLDR is included below, but I would definitely say this article deserves a full read.

TL;DR
I rely on the PDF reader with the Zotero connection to bring PDFs and reference information into Logseq. My process has two uncontroversial steps: reading and summarising. When reading, I use the highlights page on the PDF reader to read, highlight, and ask myself questions. I use the block embeds and references to connect these insights into other parts of my graph, be it a quote from the same source, or from another. Once I have read, I summarise in the source page. From there I take the information into Capacities to synthesise with other sources.

Logseq like Jupyter Notebook et similia - If you are a user of both Logseq and Jupyter Notebook et similia you know what I mean when I say that it would be great to have Logseq functionalities in interpreted/interactive notebooks.

If there are any resources that you have created or something you have seen, please do get in touch and I can include it here. I try my best to keep on top of things, but I am sure I am missing a lot of other interesting posts.

Logseq Feature Requests

You can check out the full list of Feature Requests here.

• More flexible provideUI - The experimental registerFencedCodeRenderer function accepts a render param, which can take a react component as an arg. This seems much more flexible and convenient for plugin development than provideUI + provideModel supported by onMacroRendererSlotted, etc. This is particularly true if you want to use third-party react components (re-com, MUI datatable, etc.), where it’s not feasible to provide static HTML and place all functions in a provideModel object.
• Fix shortcut CTRL-l to create alias link from page link - Ctrl-l can create links to both external URLs as well as other pages: [my link](https://mylink.com)
[my page link]([[my page]]) Given an existent link [[my page]], it would be nice for alias creation to have correct autocomplete. When visually selecting page link and and pressing crl-l, currently this happens: [[[my page]]](). Expected: []([[my page]])
• Offline mode / better offline handling - Hi all, I’ve been loving my logseq experience so far and recently setup git auto-commits. Recently decided to do some offline notetaking / air travel and noticed the app gets a bit noisy with errors. Recommend a feature to either detect network connectivity and warn once, or provide an option for offline mode.
• Add config to set/change the number of recent page - The current number of pages shown in the recent section is 15. It would be great if a user could set a desired number of recent page, via a setting in the config.edn i.e: :ui/default-recent-page-max :int
  

Until Next Time

I hope you found this blog post helpful. If you have any comments or questions, please do just let me know.

Thanks again for reading.