The Commonplace
A running record of what's worth thinking about — history, philosophy, economy, code, culture, and the world as it turns.
For centuries, readers have kept commonplace books — private notebooks where a passage worth remembering, a half-formed argument, or a stray observation was copied down and filed by theme, so that a lifetime of reading and thinking could be found again later. This is that practice, made public.
What you'll find here moves across history, philosophy, economy, programming, culture, food, local and global politics, weather, farming, and artificial intelligence — not because these fields have much in common on the surface, but because a mind paying attention doesn't stay in one lane. There's no editorial calendar and no algorithm deciding what comes next — just a running record of what seemed worth thinking about, written down before it was forgotten.
Latest Entry
The Shelf
Recently Written
GitHub Auto-Deploy
Every saved article pushes straight to this repo as markdown, photo included. Needs a Personal Access Token with Contents: read & write access — kept on this device only.
Facebook Auto-Post
Deployed articles post straight to this Page, preview built automatically from the article's own tags. Needs a Page ID and access token from Graph API Explorer — kept on this device only.
Backup & Restore
Everything in the database — articles, photos, video links — plus your GitHub/Facebook settings, in one file. ⚠️ Includes your GitHub and Facebook tokens in plain text. Keep it private.
Deploy to GitHub
All articles as markdown, organized by category, with YAML frontmatter for Jekyll/GitHub Pages.