Logseq Times 2023-02-05: New website, query examples, workflow, contributing life.

So this week has been a bit chaotic (I added the "a bit" out of politeness). The inlaws are over to see and spend some time with us, so this week was all go go go. We had to get the house (and ourselves) in order, plan things to eat and do while they are here and take some very deep breaths and prepare ourselves mentally.  

What certainly does not take many deep breaths is preparing this post with quality content from the devs and the community. This week we will look at the new website, Logseq Updates update, workflows and what it is like contributing to Logseq.

Logseq News

• Logseq went live with a beautifully redone website by their amazing designer @DerScheinriese. Great work by Jakob and the Logseq engineers who made the site a reality, together with the feedback from the community members.

• The Discord should be undergoing some changes, hopefully for the better. Reduced number of channels, easier to find your way, and lots of other improvements to facilitate communication and conversation.

Releases

For those wondering what is happening to new releases and why there has not been one for a few weeks:

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

Looking to optimise the Favourites and Recent sections on the left sidebar? @TFTHacker has us covered. To create something like the below, just follow the steps here:

Hulk asks about a way to process multiple Todos in one go: Close all todos older than a certain date

"Hi. I have a number of old todos piling up which I want to mark as done. I can run a datomic search to find them. I also understand that there is a facility to batch process todos within a single block. However, as far as I know, there is no way to batch process todos identified via a query. Is there any way to do this? Thanks."

Wanting to do a Full-text non-case-sensitive string query?

Is it possible to ignore case sensitive string queries? Say I have the multiple nodes with “Climate Trace”, “Climate TRACE”, “climatetrace”. How do I write the correct query to make sure I don’t miss any nodes? Is there regex capability?

{{query “climate trace”}}. @Siferiax provides us this query:

#+BEGIN_QUERY
{:title "Climate Trace"
:query
[:find (pull ?b [*])
:in $ ?input
:where
[(str "(?i)" ?input) ?pattern]
[?b :block/content ?c]
[(re-pattern ?pattern) ?q]
[(re-find ?q ?c)]]
:inputs ["climate trace"]
}
#+END_QUERY

You can easily change it to suit your input by amending this line :inputs ["climate trace"]

Lots of great questions and assistance on creating a Query list of all pages I created or updated during last 7 days.

Definitely worth checking out. Thanks to Siferiax for stepping in and providing us with so much query guidance.

Contacts Network and Organization - @Kirtan403 recently started using Logseq after a lot of research on PKM. They are now trying to find ways to improve the workflow on contacts and organisation.

1. Creating Contacts Network
   I am trying to meet new people and want to build a network around them. Like, If I’m meeting 2 new people today, I want to record that thing in the journal which also creates a page about that person. And record details such as whos reference that person was. Or that person is connected to another person etc. I think we can simply do that with the help of the properties. Which should generate a map of linked contacts. And I should be able to see all the contacts with type:: contact and all of their connections.
2. Structured Organization
   Logseq is knows for the unique linked outline blocks that automatically link information like our brain does. But, for the sake of simplicity, sometimes, the organization makes things simple to check for when we are not looking for anything in particular and want to see all the information about a particular thing. I know, we can specify / in the name and at creates a hierarchy that can be traversed to find the information, but that makes things difficult to write, as we need to mention the full path every time we want to link that particular thing. And it makes reading in the journal difficult. So, any plugin or any way where I can also see a structured way of my information? like a normal folder structure?

If you have any insights, please post a reply in the forum.

@Pengx17 provides us with some very cool insight into life as a Logseq Contributor. I cannot do the great blog post justice by copying and pasting parts of it or summarising it. It simply needs to be read in full.

Check it out here.

BSunter (the creator of the great Logseq GPT-3 OpenAI plugin) made a recent blog post on their site about GPT and YouTube Logseq plugin updates + migration to Substack. Read it here.

Remember @DerScheinriese, who masterminded the new Logseq website design? Well, he teases us some more with some mock-ups of potential in-app feedback. Wow, lots of great things coming to Logseq.

@Miscology asks: What is the best way to tag a research\TODO so that the answer is easy to find again, for big projects and just trivia like 1. What's the difference between a beer, lager and a stout? #research #justwondering 2. How much does a cruise ship to Antartica cost? #research #Dreams Neither of those are related to any real project, but once I've researched them I want them easy to find. Should I make flashcards out of random trivia so that two years from now I don't make a new research topic "What's the difference between ale and lager"

@cannibalox provides a suggested solution: seems like you have actions (#research), context (#justwondering, #dreams), maybe you could add a topic/category: like #drinks or #party for the beer question, then #travels or [[cruise]] for the cruise? I only use topics of interest (in an attempt to minimize the number of topics in my graph)

- What's the difference between a beer, lager and a stout? #research #justwondering #party
- How much does a [[cruise]] ship to Antartica cost? #research #Dreams #travels

Also most of the times, I tag random questions with [[Q:]] (but I guess you are using #research for that purpose) and answers with [[A:]] (A: to avoid any confusion with the todos' A priority which is a reserved tag)

@lousytrybrian writes: This is what I'm working through right now. For some reason something that is always on my mind is the though, "If I find these notes 10 years from now, would I be able to find journal entries or meeting notes or other essential things?" I feel like if everything is in daily notes/journal pages then it might be difficult to find, but what if all my meeting notes were labeled as individual notes as Meeting Notes, they would be easy to find. This is why I loved folders in Obsidian. I made a very specific structure for folders in Obsidian so that I could easily find any kind of note super easy by navigating to the proper folder. Since Logseq doesn't have folder support I'm trying to rely more on naming conventions for notes and namespaces.

Right now, one thing I'm doing is writing everything in Daily Notes/Journal and at the end of the day if I think something was important enough to require it's own page I convert the blocks to a page and then embed it on the Daily Notes/Journal page. I'm liking this workflow so far.

What are the strengths and the weaknesses of Logseq as a PKM? Also, where can a newbie learn to get started with Logseq besides the Stuttering Mind videos and website?

Interesting question posted here a few hours ago so hopefully, by the time you are reading, there will be interesting responses.

Tufte-CSS port to logseq. Is anyone a fan of Edward Tufte's approach to presenting text and visual data. There's a small but excellent CSS framework reproducing his style.

Since I spend so much time reading logseq now I figured I'd try to port it over. It's a fairly rough first pass just hitting the major elements but I've been using it and like the look a lot. It's in the logseq plugin/theme "marketplace" if you want to try it.

Full post here.

A post on Reddit asks "why sync is not free? - Why is a simple feature like sync not free?"

The responses are worth reading for anyone asking themselves the same question.

On the usage of Daily notes, @Bader says: I am a heavy journal user. During meetings I add a bullet point with the meeting topic and the time /time. Indented under it all notes related to the meeting. I do this too when someone drops off by my desk and they ask about something while I am busy to get back to them later in the day or next day. After meetings; I review the notes; make sure they are coherent. depends on the notes; different actions are taken. for example; separating the meeting notes into the relevant pages. or creating tasks to be done before next meeting etc..

Something worth pondering.

Not quite Logseq specific, but a very good read@

How to build a personal knowledge management system

Build a personal knowledge management system to organize your note taking. This ultimate guide shows you the best software, examples, and setups.

Elizabeth ButlerElizabeth Butler, MD, PhD

Logseq Feature Requests

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

• Logseq Cloud ? my wish for the evolution of logseq sync - so we have Logseq Sync that lets users synchronize their graphs across multiple devices. Why not expand to a full-featured cloud service for companies and pro users? I’d love to use a Logseq Cloud.
• Drag and drop into empty day note of Journals view does not work - When a new day note in the journals mode is created automatically and has no content yet (it says Click here to edit...) it is not possible to drag and drop anything into this note. First, you have to click into the note. This somehow creates the note in the background and now you can move bullet points into it by drag and drop.
• Shortcut for favourites - While there maybe a way to add the shortcut, why not include a default shortcut for ‘favourites’ ?
• Use AI to show related notes - Can AI be used to show related notes? I think this is a feature some other PKMSes have, and it seems like it could be really useful for generating insights.
• Open logseq on most recent page - make Logseq opens to the most recent opened page.
• Feature request for getting collapsed breadcrumbs in results - Ideally I would get list of journal pages as links, which I could hover over to preview, or shift-click to right panel for later reading.
• Select and manipulate many notes - On the all notes page, we should be able to select notes the same way we select files in finder – by Cmd-Click or shift-down-arrow… and then be able to delete them, drop them into a non-Logseq folder, tag them all, etc.
• Blank lines should be included in exported pages - When I include blank lines in my journals, they are all edited out when exported. That shouldn’t happen and makes exported text far less readable.

Logseq Plugins

• logseq-on-this-day - List all journals created on this day in one page
• logseq-date-between - make a timeline

• Smart Search changes: - Case insensitive full text search, e.g. ;notes. Yes, same syntax as filter. - You can also close the input with the user configured shortcut now.
• Smart Typing changes: - Parentheses inserted before punctuation marks can now be inserted in pairs. Previously, they were only inserted in pairs if followed by a space or end of line.
• Block Calendar has just shipped a new feature. Now you can render a yearly calendar in one block. You can even render many yearly calendars in one page if you like. Also many UX issues have been fixed, thanks for the PRs from our lovely community.
• TOC Generator updated with a new and recommended way to create TOC via the page's context menu.
• Logseq Anki Sync V4.3. 1 Update - feat:  image occlusion inside block ref images  (beta) - enhance: bump up max no. of clozers #138 - feat: add namespace processing logic by @kilesduli in #143 - enhance: keyboard events (esc, enter, etc) for modals - several bug fixes including an cache bug.
• "Awesome Styler" (fixed init for colorpickers in settings,  inline code color option added) *
• "Awesome UI" (search in page popup visibility fixed, quote style fixed)
• Logseq Graph Analysis 0.9.0. New controls to change the physics of the graph. Huge shout out to @Aleksei for submitting the pull request and coming back and continuing to work on it over weeks. This release wouldn't have existed without them.

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.