Marginalia
Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, drafted this page from our working sessions, at my request. It describes where AI helped make this garden, and what it did. I manually review each entry for accuracy. See AI Policy and Usage and Garden Brief
Code behind the site
Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, wrote most of the code that runs this garden, at my direction. I decide what each piece should do and test it on the live site.
- The page parts: the citation box under quotes, the "Previously published" box, the area, project, and category chips, and the area, project, category, and tag pages
- The home page's newest-notes boxes and the 404 page layout
- The redirects that send old My Mercurial Nature links to their new pages
- The Ko-fi button setup
- Note and Web Clipping Tool Templates that format and organize notes
Behind the scenes in my notes
Claude wrote the scripts I run in Obsidian based on a brief or task list created by me. Those include:
- Publishing checks: no Personal notes, drafts, clippings, or incomplete quotes go public
- Saving the notes I touched each day, and making daily notes for past days
- Building my Week in Review and Month in Review
- Merging duplicate clippings and setting where each note sits on the site
Writing and organizing
- Commonplace Notebook: Claude moved the citation details on my older Highlights notes into properties and formatted the citation lines. It filled in two authors from its own knowledge (Rebecca Walker and Jayne Allen), which I checked against the books. It did not change any quote.
- Home page: at my request, Claude combined my old home page and my notes on what this garden is into one page, drafting the area descriptions and publish rules from my answers. I rewrote it in my own words.
- AI Policy and Usage: Claude asked the questions and organized my answers. The words are mine.
Other tools used by Kristina and/or Claude
Notes and writing
- Obsidian, where every note starts. Core features in daily use: Properties, Bases, Daily notes, and Templates.
- Obsidian Web Clipper, for saving clippings, quotes, and book or video details from the web.
- Community plugins:
- QuickAdd by Christian B. B. Houmann, which runs the commands and scripts
- Iconize by Florian Woelki
- Style Settings by mgmeyers
- Hider and Minimal Theme Settings by kepano
- Minimal, the Obsidian theme by kepano.
The site
- The Digital Garden plugin and site template by Ole Eskild Steensen, which publish notes from Obsidian. Documentation: docs.forestry.md.
- Eleventy, the site generator the template is built on.
- Minimal by kepano, the theme the site uses.
- Minimal by kepano, the theme the site uses.
- Garden plugins: Breadcrumbs and Related notes by Ole Eskild Steensen, and Clean Print by koltensaccount.
- GitHub, where the site's files live.
- Vercel, which builds and hosts the site.
- Porkbun, where the domains are registered.
- Ko-fi, for the Donate button.
- Ghost, where My Mercurial Nature lived before. Older posts came from its export.
AI
- Claude by Anthropic, used through Cowork. Claude worked in my vault on my computer. Through its built-in browser, while I was signed in, it made changes on GitHub and checked settings on Vercel and Porkbun.
Reference
- Stimpunks, whose AI positions, open licensing, and Zibaldone rules shaped this garden's policies and my Commonplace Notebook.