Website provenance

February 1, 2026 · 3 minute read

This website, especially how the notes are curated and shown to you, is the byproduct of many developments. In 2020, I shared the first version of it, in what is now known as Ideaverse Pro. It’s been downloaded over 100,000 times. It was in essence a digital garden, a collection of around 200 notes linked together. It had personal notes, concept notes, atomic notes, evergreen notes, notes on people, and notes on how to make notes, especially special notes called maps of content. That sparked a revolution in personal notes, which I’ve been grateful to play a role.

This website couldn’t have been created in its current form without some of the best and brightest minds across the interwebs. Thanks to the creators of Obsidian: Shida Li and Erica Xu—who have empowered me and millions of others in ways big and small.

Thanks to Ward Cunningham, who made something called Federated Wiki 2011, which gave the internet a proto-example of how the value of linked notes could be realized visually. His purpose was for different people to contribute to the same wiki, which didn’t take on, but the idea of sliding panes was at least set into the zeitgeist.

Thanks to Andy Matuschak in multiple ways: for separately expanding on Ward’s work (without knowledge of it) with his public notes with sliding panes, for his introduction of evergreen notes as a concept (a needed evolution of Niklas Luhmann’s analog system), and for his thought leadership and capable articulation of his five-year experiment in creating a highly-linked collection of evergreen notes.

Thanks to Sonke Ahrens for popularizing Luhmann’s approach to making notes (known as zettelkasten) in his book How to Take Smart Notes, which directly or indirectly led to the two Germans (Christian and Sascha) creating the site zettelkasten.de, which was where we gathered in the shadows, a small but nerdy home, in the years prior to 2020.

Thanks to Kepano for his zen-like approach to everything, including his own approach to notes on his website. Whereas Andy required his experiment with evergreen notes to have a high density of links, Kepano’s notes do not. That mirrors my thinking from the 2020 LYT Kit. In reflections of Andy’s from 2024, he mentions the feeling of cognitive debt that arises from having to maintain a highly dense web of linked notes. Kepano’s website cleanly shows what is possible with a minimalistic approach. In my opinion, ideas hit harder, and fewer links is actually a gift, if done deliberately, as it is exercising the subtle art of link curation. This type of public digital garden, which is more of a minimalistic, highly-curated, “greatest hits” vibes with my ideal approach and I owe a huge thanks to Kepano for the thoughtfulness around his approach.

Visually, the soft paper background color is F5f2EA and a blue accent color of 1A7DA4. Both are colors I used in the Obsidian theme I designed called “Soft Paper.” It was initially built within a theme called Anuppuchin. In the early days of Obsidian, I created a couple cyberpunk inspired themes called “Cybertron” and “LYT Mode.” Both themes are great, I love them, but Soft Paper is the vibe I want to share with others. In all of this digital-ness, it gives us a more tactile, warm, human feeling.

The header font I use is one I’ve purchased called Canela. I first saw it via TypeWolf, and then saw it used by Maggie Appleton, whose own form of a digital garden—and the visuals within—are quite incredible. Thanks to Maggie for her inspiring digital garden, one with robust, long-form essays with custom-made visuals. A work of love, and something uniquely her own.

The body font I use is Space Grotesk, which is almost like a monospace font, but not. I enjoy it immensely. For work I share, it’s a little too digital on its own, which is why it pairs so nicely with a serif font, to tastefully balance the digital and analog worlds of thought .

Learn more about me.