I'm building a public garden, but for now selectively sharing with friends!. Hello friends! 👋
Why Roam is Awesome
It's designed for finding connections between ideas, adding structure to what's unstructured and helping unstructure what's overly structured
Each "block" (these sentences/paragraphs with the little blue dots next to them) is a building block - a snippet of an idea that can then be used and re-used
If you move your cursor just slightly to the left of the blue circle, a little triangle will appear. You can use it to collapse or expand families of blocks
Getting started
To create a new page, just put in brackets, you can even do it mid sentence. A new page will automatically be created
You can also create a page by adding a hashtag next to a word, or next to a bracketed set of words
There's no difference between the pages created through brackets and the ones through hashtag - they just have different formatting (which can help if you want to call attention and make the page bright and bolded, or just have it there all subtle and the like)
Some navigation pointers:
If you hit SHIFT and click on a page, it will appear on a sidebar to the right. It can be helpful to have a few key pages open (for example, I always my to-do's open on my rightside bar)
Hit TAB if you want to indent a block
Hit SHIFT+ALT+(Up / Down Arrow) to move blocks around -> this is a pretty sweet feature, as the whole "family" of blocks indented under a block will move along with it
CTRL+(Up / Down Arrow) expand or collapse what is under a block
That's it! That's all you really need
Getting more acquainted
Check out this fun little link - you will see at the bottom of the page a section called Linked References.
This is the beginnings of what's awesome about roam! A lot of how I have set up my personal roam is to take advantage of the Linked References section
This fun little link (which is unlinked) will show up further below on the page in the "Unlinked References"
You will need to click on the number on the right top corner (next to the X)
The number represents the total number of mentions to the page and if you click on it, you will see the mentions
If you want to reference something written in another block, all you need to do is copy that block's "address" - right-click on the blue bullet and select "copy block reference". Then when you paste that in elsewhere, you get a reference
Check out the 📚| Library and ⏳| Timelines for some WIP stuff I'm building out (oh yes, you can create special formatting for some pages if your heart desires)
My template file, based on what I have been using to build out my "second brain" library
I usually have the template open on the right-hand panel (which I open by shift-clicking on template), so its easy to copy and paste the template when I'm adding a new item to my library
If you want to know more about how I'm using it for productivity management - lets chat!
Use this as your sandbox!
If you want to adapt any of the elements of the theme, go here roam/css
This website here is fun to play with and pick colors in a palette
Your to-dos
{{DONE}} Add a reaction to this page (right click), so I know you've been here!🙌
{{TODO}} Check out roam/css - feel free to play around with it
Cultivating practices that foster creativity and learning
Tracking what I am reading
How this is organized
The beauty of Roam is in the roaming: pages don't necessarily need to follow a hierarchy. However, hierarchies can be quite helpful as maps for navigation, and in Roam, multiple hierarchies and maps can co-exist
There are four sections roughly aligned to each of my digital gardening goals
Collects different potential maps for sections of the digital garden
Some secondary goals
I love absolutely love Roam (became a believer about an hour after discovering it existed). This little garden is also my attempt to bring my friends into the cult. So there are a lot of miscellaneous commentaries thrown around to describe process, etc.