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conventions

Aug 19, 2026 • 5 min read

Vault conventions

What a note must look like to belong here. Derived from what the vault actually does, not from aspirational plans — misc/Workflow.md describes a folder scheme that was never built; read it as intent, not as a map.

Frontmatter

A --- block on line 1. Keys unquoted unless YAML requires otherwise.

Atomic note — Inbox/ and Notes/, the default shape:

---
title: Boolean blindness
created_at: 2023-01-17T16:33:23+01:00
growth: Seedling
publish: false
---

Daily journal (Templates/Daily.md): created_at, title: YYYY-MM-DD, publish: false, then one ## HH:MM section per writing session.

Weekly journal (Templates/Weekly.md): created_at, type: weekly_journal, aliases: ["2026 W34", "2026 W34: Aug 17 - Aug 23"], publish: false.

Book chapter (Templates/Book Notes.md): book, chapter_number, chapter_title, chapter_note_index.

Field rules

  • created_at — YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS±HH:MM. Seconds always present, real local offset, never Z, never milliseconds. Get it from date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%:z, or let a template resolve it. Hand-written values get this wrong; prefer obsidian create ... template="Seedling 🌱".
  • growth — the classification axis. Ladder: Seedling → Budding → Potted → Evergreen. Capitalized, unquoted. New notes start at Seedling. Do not change growth when moving a note between folders — filing and ripening are independent, and the git history shows moves never touch it.
  • title — must equal the filename, with two sanctioned exceptions: a 00 book-index prefix and a YYYY-MM-DD journal prefix may be dropped. Never invent a different title. Quartz falls back to the filename stem when the key is absent, so a title that differs silently renames the page.
  • aliases — inline list, double quotes: aliases: ["A", "B"].
  • tags — this key does not exist in this vault. Never add it. growth is the classification axis.

Filenames

  • Atomic notes: sentence case with real spaces. Boolean blindness.md, How will AI impact Software Engineering?.md. No kebab-case, no dates, no emoji. Question marks are fine.
  • The filename is the note’s identity. Wikilinks resolve by basename, so a rename breaks every inbound link.
  • Periodic notes follow the periodic-notes config exactly — conformance was 100% as of 2026-08-18, so do not break it:
    • daily Journal/YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD.md
    • weekly Journal/gggg/gggg-week-ww.md (ISO week-year)
  • Book chapters live in Books/<Book Title>/, index note 00 <Book Title>.md.
  • Free-form journal: YYYY-MM-DD Title.md or Title ~ Context.md. The space-padded tilde is the author’s separator.

Where notes go

Counts measured 2026-08-18. Recount with find digital-garden/<dir> -name '*.md' | wc -l.

Folder~NotesRule
Inbox/48Every new note starts here. Private via ignorePatterns.
Notes/248Atomic notes. Public.
Journal/387Dailies, weeklies, Free form/, Self Reflection/, Yearly/. Private, with 3 deliberate exceptions in Free form/.
Books/40Reading notes. Public.
Projects/20Semi-dormant. Ask first.
Research/, misc/, Organization/25Dormant over a year. Ask first.
Clippings/, smart-chats/0Never used. Do not write here.
static/251 filesAttachments. Everything here publishes.
  1. Inbox/ → Notes/ is the only real promotion path, and it is rare — about 20 moves in the vault’s whole history. Use git mv. Propose it; do not decide it. Moving out of Inbox/ leaves the ignored area, so re-check publish before every move.
  2. Do not create new top-level folders.
  3. Never write to .trash/, .obsidian/, .smart-connections/, or Templates/. The {{title}} placeholders in Templates/ must stay unrendered.
  • Internal links are wikilinks, shortest form: [[Boolean blindness]]. No .md, no folder prefix. app.json sets newLinkFormat: "shortest".
  • Alias [[Target|label]], heading [[Target#heading|Heading]]. Block refs are never used — do not introduce them.
  • Images embed as ![[static/filename.png]].
  • External links are markdown: [text](https://…). No markdown link in the vault points at a vault note. Keep it that way.

Roughly 1,750 of ~3,565 wikilinks resolve to nothing, most of them in Journal/. This is a habit, not decay: the author brackets proper nouns as forward references. [[Hope Media]] appears 86 times and the note was never written.

Never delete a broken link. Never auto-create a stub note for one. The only exception is a broken link inside a published note, which renders as dead text on the site — raise those, do not silently fix them. The audit script reports that subset only.

Tags

Inline #Tag only, and rare — about 122 uses across 78 notes. Use only the existing vocabulary: #Question, #ToProcess, #ContinueHere, #TODO, #CounterArgument, #ToSplit, #ToConnect. No hierarchy. Do not invent tags, and do not add a tags: frontmatter key.

Known drift

Pre-existing inconsistencies. Do not copy them; do not mass-fix them either.

  • 37 weekly notes have an aliases week number that disagrees with the filename — 29 in 2022, 6 in 2021, one each in 2025 and 2026. Not purely historical, so check the alias you write.
  • chapter_number mixes 09, 9, 1, 0 and blanks. Unquoted, so 09 is a string and 9 an integer on the same key.
  • book values collide by quoting: Can't Hurt Me appears both quoted and unquoted, so grouping by book yields duplicate groups.
  • The MoC layer is abandoned. All moc: notes were last touched in late 2023, none contains the template’s Dataview query, and moc: Finances points at a note that does not exist. Do not create new MoCs unasked.
  • Monthly notes are dead — one note, from 2021. Journal/Yearly/ replaced them.

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