Cardamom

Cardamom is zettelkasten + knowledge lakehouse

2025-08-13: currently in abeyance as I use obsidian + paper more and more.

Concept of Cards

• should serve zk + kl (above) ideas (ie., it is primarily not a blog, but secondarily is.)
• should be quick and easy to log entries. In practice, it means there are unique input forms for each content type.

App Design

• It will be implemented as a web application.
• intended to be a single person app
• ideally self hosted
• on a hosting provider like flyio
• RSS feed

Data Design

• each card will have a unique id like - 20250716101709 - YYYYMMDDHHMMSS
• every card will be accessed over URL like /c/20250716101709
• cards can be added to lists
• cards can have slugs so that they can have short go codes: /go/about
• cards can have attachments
• attachments will be uploaded to a cloud storage like Cloudlare R2 under <bucket>/YYYY/MM/DD/Name.file.ext
• content types: note (in the ZK sense), blogmark, post, quotation, and tweet (message)?

Visual Design

• visually distinguish a note (an index card, or kasten), a post, a quote, post, and a message.

To investigate / Inspiration

• makranda cards
• scroll.pub
• are.na, specifically catherine jue’s are.na page.
  • monochrome
  • use fonts as design
  • sparse, minimalistic
  • view by - blocks, channels, table, index.
  • order by - relevance, updated, newest, oldest, alphabetical, no of connections
  • “Channels are collections of content built around an idea. You can add images, links, PDFs, videos, text etc.”

Inspirations

SimonWillison.net

• Django backend
• YYYY/Mon/DD format
• simple layout
• backup strategy using db-to-sqlite
• Search using postgresql vector search
• blogmark, and quotation content types

Kottke.org

• visual layout. three columns.

others

• catskull