Using this vault says you never have to know where a note goes before you write it. True — but somebody decides eventually, you or an agent working a folder. This is how that decision is made.
The rule that does most of the work
A note lives in exactly one folder. It belongs to as many rooms as its categories: frontmatter names, and the site lists it inside every one of them, on top of the folder it physically sits in.
So the folder is storage and the categories are belonging. That takes almost all of the weight off “which folder”, which is the question people agonise over. Put it where its subject sits, then name every other room it genuinely belongs to. A book about persuasion can be filed with the relationships it is used for and still stand on the library shelf, because the shelf reads the category, never the directory.
Getting the folder slightly wrong is survivable. Leaving categories: empty is not — a note with no categories exists in exactly one place, and that is rarely the only place a reader would look for it.
Choosing the folder
Ask what the note is about at its core, not what it mentions. A note that argues about AI but is really about not letting a tool erode your own capacity is a note about you, and it goes to the room that holds how you run. A note that mentions a trip but is really about the nature of mind is not a travel note.
The seven rooms, in the order they climb:
- Alignment — the body and the day. Habits, health, attention, routine, and owning your own tools rather than renting them.
- Travel — leaving the familiar, and whatever gets made out of the experience.
- Work — anything with a deliverable behind it, and what was learned doing it.
- Friends — one note per person, and what holds people together over time.
- Shared — anything pointed outward: other people’s material, recommendations, what actually gets posted.
- Library — one note per book, with what stuck.
- Meaning — mind, reality, faith, purpose. It absorbs anything introspective by default, so check the others first.
Why seven, why that order, and why the site colours them the way it does: Chakras. Worth reading once — the ordering is the argument, and the history is not what most people will tell you it is.
Choosing the categories
Every room the note genuinely belongs to, not decoration. Each entry puts the note in a real listing, so an entry that is only loosely true adds noise to somebody else’s room.
The useful generalisation, learned from how books and clippings already work here: form decides the category, subject decides the folder. A book gets [[Library]] whatever it is about; someone else’s article gets the clippings tag and the Clippings category whatever it is about. Both then sit in the folder their subject belongs to.
Two mechanics that bite:
- A category naming a room whose folder note is not published does nothing on the site. It still works inside Obsidian, so it is worth writing anyway — just do not expect the page to appear.
- Link a folder note by its full path with an alias —
[[Shared/Clippings/Clippings|Clippings]], not[[Clippings]]. A bare name cannot resolve to a folder note, because a folder note’s address ends in/index.
Naming
Two notes with the same name in different rooms make every bare [[link]] to either one ambiguous, and it poisons categories: values silently — the entry looks correct and points at the wrong room. Rename one of them. Do not disambiguate link by link; the next person to write a bare link reintroduces it.
Every folder carries a note of its own name at Folder/Folder.md, with a description: line. If that note is published it must not be empty — an empty published folder note is a blank page standing above real ones.
publish: true is set by Alexandre and nobody else. Everything here is private until he says otherwise.
Smells
Things that mean a note is misfiled, in rough order of how often they turn up:
- A published note with no
categories:— it is reachable from one folder and nowhere a reader would look. - A folder note that is published and empty.
- A path-shaped link left behind after a move. Obsidian repaths the links it tracks, not the ones written by hand or pasted, so a folder that gets reorganised leaves a trail of
[[old/path/note]]behind it. - A
categories:entry naming the room the note used to live in, kept out of habit rather than because it belongs to both. - Two notes with the same name in different rooms.
Related: Using this vault for capture, Frontmatter for what each key obliges, private for what a tag obliges, Vault Map for the tour, private for the session protocol an agent follows when it works a folder.