Thoughts from 2023

It’s an old note, just for archival purposes. There might be newer alternatives. Also, old blog template used another method of referencing urls, don’t have it yet here, so leaving it as-is: link

I have a need to share how much I love Zotero. It was a tool that was a significant part of my academic journey and I had fallen in love while I was writing my B.Sc. thesis¹, and all coexisting add-ons were indirectly responsible for about 50 references mentioned. I’ve recently also incorporated Zotero into my workflow alongside another side-project on Notion.

Other remarkable features that Zotero offers:

• Awesome notes on existing PDFs. A bit better than hypothes.is² what was my main driver in B.Sc. era for taking notes from PDFs.³
• Collection mechanism - it’s a bit specific approach for zotero and needs time to be used to.
• Group collections that you can share your findings in teams.⁴

What add-ons were helpful?

Firefox extension

Zotero Connector for Firefox simplifies the process of adding new database entries. A single click can trigger metadata extraction, and in some cases, even full-text PDF retrieval.⁵

Better Bibtex

Better Bibtex allows exporting yours database in format compatible with Latex.

Only Latex?

If you need a place to take notes and mention/link your entries, Obsidian might be a good place to start. There is a great tutorial that was a great inspiration, available in this Zotero–Obsidian academic workflow guide.

There is a newer approach, however, that might work a bit better - Obsidian Zotero Plugin. Haven’t tested yet.

But what if I want to share my zotero-based entries with friends?

Sometime tool just doesn’t suit well, and forcing others to use obsidian might be imposing useless cognitive overload, so then Notion comes into play with notero extension. Works surprisingly smooth.

To wrap up, there are more efficient workflows than relying solely on a Word database or gathering references in a single designated file. And they may be integrated with your favorite applications

Footnotes

1. That’s the one tag which supposedly is a river and doesn’t match to other apps listed. ↩

2. Zotero has much more colors to highlight text. ↩

3. While PDF support in Zotero is superior, I was mainly taking notes from websites where hypothesis were better. Look in further sources section for great review of note-taking tools. ↩

4. Sharing is caring, or something like that. ↩

5. I was thinking if there may be an extension using other, less legal sources. Yep, they exist. ↩

Be aware that it is a n old post. Just reference or an inspiration if someone is lost.

Years ago I had a thought to seperate repo with hugo theme and the one with rendered page due to possible use of utterances¹. There are my experiences with both approaches:

deploying page to the same repo

• Astro docs provides a good starting point

deploying site elsewhere

• There is a a convinient github-action
• Can you reuse withastro/action@v0 to build it? You might, but it is designed for scenario above, this action creates an artifact that is consumed by actions/deploy-pages@v1 action.
  • tl;dr: there are better ways

Example of deploying astro blog to github pages

There is my example of working github action.

Things worth to note:

• By using actions to install node and pnpm there is huge time savings due to caching.
• There should be a .nojekyll file in blog root - otherwise css is messed up²

Footnotes

1. Is it a good idea? One of tutorials on integrating utterances with astro doesn’t have it either. I hope not to see it as a opinion whether this is good option, but someday I will give it a try. ↩

2. Source ↩