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February 23, 2022

Dendron Weekly: 0.83 release, link to block anchors in your source code, revamped docs on publishing config options, and more!

It’s time for a weekly roundup! The email newsletter is a curated collection of weekly updates about Dendron and the Dendron community!

Dendron 0.83 has sprouted 🌱

  • Dendron 0.83 Release Notes

Breaking changes: This release of Dendron updates the publishing configuration within dendron.yml. Updated workspaces will not work with older version of dendron-cli, so make sure to update.

  • More information: 0.83 Changelog.

Pod V2 preview continues to grow: you can now export the contents of a hierarchy, filtered by a target vault. This means the multi-vault workspaces can be more targeted in their exports without including notes from undesired vaults.

  • More information: Pod v2 exportScope

File Links now support block anchors (^block-anchor)! This means that you can create comments in your code, and link directly to the comment blocks. This is configurable to use the older method of linking to line numbers.

Block anchors are more reliable because they will always refer to the marked line, but Dendron has to modify the file to insert a block anchor which looks like ^this. You are free to move the anchor anywhere in the file or to put comment markers like // or # or anything else before them.

  • More information: File Links

Highlights

  • enhance(pods): add vault filter for pods-v2 hierarchy export
  • enhance(notes): change dendron id format to be alphanumeric lowercase
  • enhance(workspace): Block Anchor support for non-note files
  • deprecate(publishing): Legacy publishing has now been removed from dendron-cli. Dendron users that haven’t yet migrated from dendron buildSite commands must migrate to using the dendron publish commands.

Everything Else

  • enhance(workspace): calculate backlinks and anchors in engine for improved editor responsiveness
  • fix(workspace): Fixed instances where Journal note title values weren’t properly formatted as yyyy-MM-dd and the traitID of journalNote wasn’t being applied
  • fix(workspace): Dendron will try to parse non-dendron files in onFirstOpen
  • fix(workspace): error message to be readable in error toast
  • fix(publish): horizontal line’s height in publishing
  • fix(publish): properly set siteIndex when it’s not explicitly set by config
  • deprecate(publishing): Legacy publishing has now been removed from dendron-cli. Dendron users that haven’t yet migrated from dendron buildSite commands must migrate to using the dendron publish commands.
    • Common commands for Next.js publishing with dendron-cli
    • Upgrade Instructions

Community

General

  • We added bookmark bot to the Dendron Discord, meaning that users can now react to a message with :bookmark: 🔖 and Bookmarker will save it for them in a direct message.

Publishing Documentation Updates

A significant review and refresh of publishing settings can be seen in the Publishing configuration reference documentation. Make sure to take a look at all of the configuration options currently available when publishing websites with Dendron!

Starboard and TIL Highlights

These are highlights from the Dendron Discord #starboard and #today-i-learned channels.

  • ⭐ seadude shared how to create clickable areas of images that he found useful in reveal.js presentations: “Today I learned you can create a clickable area (or more than one) of an image and have it link anywhere.”

    • Useful for RevealJS presentations, etc.
    • Done by using the usemap parameter of <img> and <map> HTML tags
    • View example snippet
  • 💡 seadude shared information about VS Code Snippets:

    • Related: Dendron Snippet Maker
    • View example snippets
  • 💡 scriptautomate shared a link to the Sourcegraph VS Code extension: “TIL about the Sourcegraph extension for VS Code. I feel like it has interesting potential. Like, imagine searching public Dendron vaults directly from your VS Code?”

Dendron Reading Series

This week’s entry in the Dendron Reading Series.

  • Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’t

Credit to Jack of some quantity of trades#3247, a Dendrologist from the Dendron community, for contributing the link and summary for this week’s Dendron Reading Series!

Even with all the best tools, are you still struggling to get things done?

Data suggests that people mainly uses to-do lists and associated productivity software to manage their mood rather than to organize their activities. Typically, the contents of to-do lists is poorly correlated with things accomplished, which seem to usually be what people remember on the spur of the moment or felt like doing anyway.

Of all technology, productivity software is rather uniquely suited to evoke experiences of guilt and virtue (this has something to do with the Protestant work ethic). Adding items to to-do lists allows us to maintain the conceit that we will take care of them at some point, providing a semblance of cognitive and emotional relief. Though, since people usually don’t actually do the things on their lists, they become “lists of shame” that continue accumulating until they are abandoned in “productivity bankruptcy.”

Ultimately, the drive to adopt productivity tools and methods may reflect the fear of death (“We like lists because we do not want to die”); having a sense of our mortality and finite time, and wanting to accomplish our infinite ambitions and desires.

All of this may be rather bleak, but there are a couple prescriptions that emerge from this perspective:

  1. More effective use of lists of tasks may be made by assigning them to specific blocks of time in a schedule. This kind of planning forces us to come to terms with what it is actually possible for us to accomplish.
  2. We can avoid generating “lists of shame” by making sure that the rates at which we are adding to our to-do lists are comparable with the rates at which we are completing tasks. This may require reconciling oneself with one’s mortality and accepting existential limits.

Related

  • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, of Oliver Burkeman: This book discusses prescription #2 in some depth
  • Life as Nonproductive Act, from David McLaver’s Overthinking Everything substack: Contains some musings about the Protestant work ethic in contemporary circumstances.
  • Complice: Beyong Getting Things Done
    • The Complice paradigm is designed with some of these things in mind, eschewing exhaustive collection in favor of focusing on what is most important on a day-to-day basis. Productivity software that implements Complice is typically designed to prevent the accumulation of lists of shame by preventing the user from unreflectively carrying tasks over from day to day, among other design features.

Event Reminders

  • Greenhouse Talks: Visit the Greenhouse Talks for notes from previous sessions.
    • Subject: Getting Things Done (GTD) and Other Task-Management Workflows (with Dendron!)
    • Description: Interested speakers from the community will take 5 - 10 minutes each to present their workflows for managing actionable information, followed by an open discussion. The event will be recorded and later published online.
    • Next: Fri, Feb 25, 4:00 PM PST / 00:00 UTC
    • Greenhouse Talk Recordings - YouTube Playlist
  • Office Hours: Visit the Office Hours page for notes from previous sessions.
    • Next: Wed, Mar 02, 9:00 AM - 9:30 AM PST
    • Office Hour Recordings - YouTube Playlist
  • New User Tuesdays: Visit the New User Tuesdays page for notes from previous sessions.
    • Next: Tue, Mar 08, 8:30 AM - 9:00 AM PST

Thank You’s

A big thanks to the following gardeners that brought up issues, contributions, and fixes to this release :man_farmer: :woman_farmer: Visit Discord Roles for more information.

  • Im
    • Issue: Feedback on Graph View
  • Callum Mcdonald @chmac#2931
    • Issue: Greenhouse Event link to A Day in Dendron is broken
  • Vincent Dansereau
    • #role.taxonomist
    • Issue: css edit link points to documentation that doesn’t exists anymore
  • James Henry @henry-js#6283
    • #role.taxonomist
    • Troubleshooting #lookup-shortcut-is-not-working for Vim extension conflicts
  • Tycholiz @Tychronos#6624
    • Issue: Select vault not working as intended: not all vaults showing up
  • Ryan Hill @rlh1994#9754
    • Issue: Page not publishing with publishByDefault: false and front matter published: true

Surveyors

A huge thanks to the following Dendronites that provided feedback in the 2022 Dendron User Survey. If you would like to help us improve Dendron, please checkout the survey (and earn a shiny Surveyor Discord badge in the process)!

  • @Idan#8549
  • @aleksey#5276
  • @d1onysus#1514
  • @foureyedsoul#0796
  • @cro#5610

As Always: Community Resources

  • Join the Dendron Discord
  • Register for Dendron Events on Luma
  • Follow Dendron on Twitter
  • Checkout Dendron on GitHub
  • Read the Dendron Blog
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