The future is Title Tags

Context

Chad and I started Flogger for fun (still WIP).
We wanted to practice Vue and thought it’d be fun to make a notes-taking app.

The app I had been using, SimpleNote, was a bare bones app by Auttomatic. I didnt love it but NVAlt had died. RIP.
SimpleNote became unreliable around late 2024 so I turned more attention to Flogger. The core tenets of Flogger were:

  1. Data portability
    You should own your files.
    That means they remain in a universal format.
  2. **Progressive enhancement
    **The app should only add a layer of tools.

Inevitable complexity

I needed a new notepad in the meantime.

People said Notion was great.
When I tried it out recently it was a Frankenstein of a dumpster fire.
It brought to mind MicroSoft Word, Adobe and WordPress.
I made a living from for better part of two decades from the simplicity that revolved around “The Loop”, but it’s now becoming Drupalized, as I write about here.
But now I’m a happy Obsidian user — it does so much so well.
Does that make Flogger irrelevant?
Great as Obsidian is it has a kitchen sink feel.
I wanted Flogger to be simple, useful and frictionless.

I started getting personal traction with Flogger when I started thinking of it a stream of thought note taker, like a personal twitter.
Instead of all the ways of organizing notes in Obsidian I said let’s go back the just the tag.
But even typing tags can get in the way.
What doesn’t cause friction is the act of summarizing sections in titles.
And guess what, tag markdown is eerily similar to title markdown!
Only a nary space away.

#tag

Title that can be an array of tags

That’s when it clicked for me.
We have natural language calendars now,
why not natural language tags?

Can we run algorithms on titles to create tag relationships?

  • Strip out articles like “a” and “the”.
  • Rank tags by importance from beggining to end of the title

The hope is that organization of notes will happen automatically and organically with good titles. All the while retraining our brains to write highly semantic titles.

The next phase will be a Graph View (hopefully more usable than Obsidian’s jellyfish) that uncovers relationships and hierarchies between flogs and entries.