While git-notes are really simple to get started with, more advanced techniques can make them more effective.
Making one or more of your git-notes repos public, let's share your knowledge with others and get feedback from them.
A repo can be changed from private to public. For GitHub, see Making a repository public.
A copyright or license allows others to use your notes in ways that you intend, while protecting it from unauthorized uses.
Adding a copyright is as simple as adding the copyright symbol, the year, and your name to your README.md file. See How Do I Correctly Format a Copyright? for more infomation. If this document were copyrighted, it would look like:
© 2021, DigitalReplica, LLC.
Creative Commons](https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/) offers several licenses to provide flexible ways to share your work.
Best practice is to add a file to your repository named LICENSE.txt to your repo with the license text in it. See Licensing a repository. Alternately, you can add your license as a snippet in your README.md file.
GitHub allowed each repo to be classified with a topic. By tagging your notes with the notes topic, others can more easily find them.
GitHub adds a [sponsor button]https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/customizing-your-repository/displaying-a-sponsor-button-in-your-repository) to your repo when the special file .github/FUNDING.yml is added. You can add your sponsorship links to provide ways to support your work.
Not all notes will be public, so this section explores different methods to either share private notes with a community, or make them totally private so only you can access.
Cloud git providers host the private source code for many companies, so they have some of the most secure software in the world: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket.
GitHub
- Create a private notes repository.
- Add collaborators
Create a private repo, and don't give anyone access to it. Only you will be able to see the contents.
Hosting a private git server requires a bit more technical knowledge, but there are plenty of guides for how to do this. Git on the Server is a good starting point.
A git repository can be hosted in a folder of any cloud storage or file sharing mechanism. It can be kept completely private, or shared with others. It requires some git command line knowledge, and Git Basics is a good reference.
The most secure method is using local storage, which can be your computer, a thumb drive, or file server. Encrypting the storage device before using adds additional security (but is beyond the scope of this guide.) Creating a local git repo is exactly the same as the cloud storage option, using the command line and Git Basics reference.
This section looks on how to organize notes within a git-notes repo. It's very much a work in progress, with multiple approaches being tried. Read through these principals and see what works.
Changing the filename of a note breaks links. While this can be fixed with a search and replace in your notes, it still breaks other people linking to your public notes.
Notes are at first a quick way to remember things, then a dumping ground of everything related to a topic. But hopefully what emerges is an ever more organized understanding of it. That process takes time and editing, which is easier to to in a single file.
Linking makes it easier to hop from topic to topic, idea to idea. It reinforces recall through repetition.
When creating new note files, keep them all in the same directory when possible. This makes relative linking within notes much easier
Once comfortable that git-notes is useful and working, take a look at git-knowledge for a method of linking multiple repos together into a larger knowledge system.