Happy Tuesday, fellow Roamans,

Welcome to another letter, jam-packed with a selection of the latest things happening in the world of Roam and tools-for-thought.

Around the Roaman Empire

Something to watch

If you’re hankering for some productive consumption and have an interest in knowledge graphs and their future. In that case, these videos featuring Ivo Velitchkov and Conor White-Sullivan might satisfy your cravings.

Ivo gave a presentation at a follow-up event to the ENDORSE conference

And Conor appeared in a panel discussion at the I Annotate 2021 conference

AugmentMinds Unconference

While we’re on the topic of tools-for-thought, you may be interested in the first Unconference in the tools-for-thought space on July 25th, 2021. From their site:

More details can be found here: https://opencollective.com/psionica/events/augment-minds-7d13842a​

Drafting Pages workflow

​A short but valuable Loom video from Jason Griffing demonstrating his workflow for drafting longer forms of content and how he uses Focus on Block to zoom in and out.

Roam Connect

One for the developers amongst you. Tyler Sullberg has created a simple API endpoint service to make it easy to add more ways to get information into your Roam graph. Check it out.

Roam CSS System

​Alexander Rink has created an epic CSS System for Roam to make it quick and easy for every user to adjust Roam’s style to your own aesthetic.

​Read more about how it works and get started.​

The David Vargas RoamJS Corner

First, the great news - David’s fundraising goal to work on v2 of SmartBlocks was successful, and he’s well underway, already releasing a bare-bones new version which is a lot faster. At this time, I wouldn’t recommend using it if you have more complex SmartBlocks that you use often.

Somehow, he is still finding time to keep releasing additional extensions. Another handy one is a Google Drive integration, similar to the one for Dropbox. It intercepts the native Roam file upload and stores the files into your own Google Drive account instead.

Finally, and this one is a biggie, he has also released Marketplace, an extension to browse and install extensions directly from your graph.

It even tries to detect extensions you’ve already got installed and moves them into a single location so that it can manage them moving forwards.

Combined with David’s other announcement to have others contributing and developing extensions at RoamJS.com, it realises the initial vision for Roam Depot.

;;KB Shortcuts

Ramses Oudt and Beau Haan will be holding a live YouTube stream on Friday, July 16th, 2021, where they’ll discussing and demonstrating practical use cases for using Roam more efficiently using Keyboard Maestro.

They’ll be showing you how to set up templates, customise your Roam keyboard shortcuts, and other automations to make the most of your environment.

Keep an eye out on Ramses Twitter for the YouTube link or better yet subscribe to the RoamStack newsletter - it’s almost as good as this one! 😉

Roam Book Club 5

Roam Book Club 5 will be starting up again soon. If you’re not already signed up, you can get on the list via the Typeform at https://roamresearch.typeform.com/to/adiOzQqR​

Most exciting, well for me at least, is that I am taking over the weekly newsletter duties from Matt McKinlay. So while it’s running, if you’re on board with RBC, then I’ll be all over your inbox like a rash!

I am looking forward to trying out a few experiments. One of the challenges of the book clubs, and especially in busy graphs is keeping people up to date and engaged by highlighting the most interesting ideas and insights and encouraging more participation to add to the collective knowledge. Multiply that upwards when in the future, there will likely be many more book clubs running.

Some big questions I hope to explore:

• Can we curate and disseminate ideas and insights to advance our collective intelligence and foster a more diverse and inclusive group of interesting people?
• Could Roam Research improve on and ultimately even replace email newsletters?

I’m also keen to find other ways to encourage the community. The book club is filled with engaging and fascinating people from around the world. It’s a great way to find others with who you may share interests but would otherwise never get to meet.

If you have other ideas, I'd love to hear them. Just reply to this email.

Thinking Out Loud

🤫A few weeks ago Bardia revealed a new secret feature for Roam, which added a native button feature to fire Roam templates.

All you need to do is type and copy in the block reference of the [[roam/template]] you want it to fire when you click it.

I love Roam42 and SmartBlocks for helping me automate many of the regular activities I do in Roam, but with the original implementation, it’s slow and prone to problems.

However, in the meantime, this new native feature gives me the speed I desire, especially for populating my daily notes page each day. I have re-tooled mine to combine these new native template buttons and SmartBlocks buttons for more advanced functionality.

This is what my Daily Note Page (DNP) template now looks like:

If you look carefully, you might notice a few of the buttons are a little shorter in height - they are my SmartBlock buttons, whilst the rest are all the new template buttons.

Each button corresponds to another set of blocks on the template page. For example, the Daily Reflection button triggers this template:

When you click a template button, it replaces itself with the results of the template block.

The button is created in the template by first copying the block reference of the top-level block, which acts as the name of the template. Add the button and paste in the block reference When you click away, the button assumes the template name. Change the title of this, and you’ll see the name of the button change in real-time.

You can fire SmartBlocks functionality from buttons in a similar way.

For example, my Stoic Reflection button looks like this:

This references my SmartBlock, which has a command to grab a random block from a particular page.

The primary benefit of this is the speed with which the DNP can be populated. It’s instantaneous rather than having to wait 10-15 seconds for my pure SmartBlocks solution to work its way through.

There’s a second advantage of turning everything into buttons too. Rather than simply templating a complete page full of page reference sections, the button acts as a reminder and placeholder of a possible section. If you don’t use it, you don’t pollute your graph with an unnecessary reference without any helpful information nested below. As your graph grows, and you do queries, etc., then this becomes more pronounced.

I can quickly go through and delete the unused buttons to leave a daily note page with only useful information at the end of the day.

An excellent addition for this use-case would be an option for the buttons to self-destruct after a defined period. Then they can clean themselves up after 24 hours.

I don’t expect this functionality to come to native Roam any time soon, but David Vargas indicated it would be possible with SmartBlocks v2, so when the speed parity is there, I expect I’ll move back to a pure SmartBlocks version of this template if the self-destructing buttons can save me some mental friction of remembering to remove them.

If you forget to manually clean up the buttons, create a new page called x-template-button and then use the unlinked references to find any you’ve missed and delete them.

So, now all I have to do on my Daily Notes Page each day is hit ;;, find my DNP template entry and my page is populated instantly.

If that feels like too much work then Mark Lavercombe has a roam/js solution for you.

With it, you can set up your blocks as I described in my setup, but instead, just create the main daily notes templates somewhere in your graph. I have a [[meta/templates]] page for this purpose. You can create different templates for each day of the week, or just one for working days and one for non-work days. Populate the script configuration lines with the relevant block references for each day.

Once activated, it’ll populate your DNP with the chosen template automatically. Mark even put a short Loom video together to demonstrate it.

Happy Templating!

As always, if you have thoughts on this or other tools-for-thought related topics, hit reply and send me an email. I love reading them all.

Until next time,

Andy

P.S. If you enjoy my letters and find them valuable and would like to help support me with the running costs, you can do so at Buy Me a Coffee. You're also able to book personal 1-1 Roam coaching sessions if you're looking for some help and guidance with your graph setup.