I collect quotes that resonated with me when reading books, listening to podcasts, or watching videos in respective md file - quote-money.md, quote-work.md, quote-health.md, quote-life.md.

After collecting over 250+ quotes, I'm seeing following problem emerge

• Since I was using markdown there was no way cross reference category, if the quote span across multiple categories. For a short time, using tags solved the problem, but it was not ideal for listing quote by tag.
• Reading by tag/author is simply not possible.
• No randomness: I wanted to see one of my collected quote randomly.

While brainstorming with Claude, I learnt there's a name for what I was doing. People call it a commonplace book, a personal notebook of quotes and ideas worth keeping. So I built an online version of it - Sridhar's commonplace.

Design choices

I made only two design choices for this project.

• Quotes are full of quote marks, and escaping every one of them in JSON is painful. YAML needs no escaping, and its multi-line support keeps long quotes readable. So, I chose YAML over JSON. Each quote is a YAML object with three fields: text, author, and tags.

  - text: |
      Be curious. Read widely. Try new things.
      What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
    author: Aaron Swartz
    tags: [curiosity]

• There should be NO database and NO server. Each category can have its own YAML file to be backward compatible.

Commonplace

I wrote a neat little Python utility script to turn these yaml files into a static website. Every time I push to GitHub, GitHub Actions builds the site and publishes it on GitHub Pages for free.

URL: https://sridharrajs.github.io/commonplace

Each Category/Author/tag has its own page with associated quotes. The home page shows a random quote, and the Surprise me button shuffles to the next.

So far, I've moved 53 of my 250+ quotes, and the rest are work in progress. Meanwhile, if you keep quotes too, fork commonplace and start your own.