There's a new section on this site that allows to navigate quotations: quotes.michelepasin.org. It's just a cut-down implementation of an old idea I worked on a while ago, but you know.. sometimes it is useful to start from scratch and re-think things from the ground up.

Why?

These are quotes I've been collecting here and there, over the years, using various apps like NVALT, Notes or emails. The quotes have also been categorised a little using tags and titles.

Since I hate to have stuff lying around on my hard drive and hardly being used, I've made a new webapp that allows to browse all of this content.

Possibly, someone other than me can find it useful or inspiring.

A bit of history

A while ago, I built a webapp called ResQuotes (and later, Liquid Quites). It was meant to be a personal information management site that allows one to collect and organise snippets of text ('highlights') made while reading digitally (more info in this post).

The project eventually got nowhere, but the need to organize and share quotes is still very much alive.

So I've taken all the old quotes I had, reprocessed them using a simple markdown-based format, saved them in a special Obsidian vault (which is really just like a folder with markdown files on your computer). Now I have hundreds of quotes at my fingertip, editable and searchable offline using Obsidian.

Finally, I've added this markdown to the this site's publishing pipeline in order to turn them into HTML.

This makes it easier to access the quotes from anywhere, by anyone.

What is looks like

Warning: it's messy and rough. But isn't that always the necessary first step in order to begin improving things?

For example, here is the page for all quotes tagged with #software:

And here's what a single quote page looks like:

To-dos

• keyword search
• more related quotes sections
• some mechanism to grab quotes from websites straight into Obsidian
• same with Kindle highlights ..