I want my website/homepage to give me ways to keep track of bookmarks, notes and highlights in the things that I’m reading. I’m typically creating these on my phone or tablet, and the kind of data varies with the kind of reading:

• when browsing the web, I’m saving tagged bookmarks into Pinboard. This is like my private search engine, where it’s easy to recall things I have seen in the past that I wanted to remember.
• when reading on my phone or tablet, it’s usually RSS or Instapaper–in that case, I’m typically highlighting passages and marking posts as favorites. I want to be capturing my highlights and favs as content in Sanity.
• I don’t typically read books on computer, but I also want to be capturing highlights and tracking favs as content in Sanity.

Seems like we have a system starting to come together:

1. bookmarks can continue living in Pinboard, and I can provide a way to browse and search these on my personal site.
2. I have the same workflow triggers for my reading. I want to save favorite articles or books into Sanity, and I want to capture highlights or reading notes on those entities.

Are a highlight and a note the same? I think so, because they’re both text. That text could be anchored to a page or other location, but it’s all just text content at the end of the day. I think I would want to create multiple entries, with one for each note/highlight. This also allows for a note to be combined with a highlight if a passage triggers a thought.

This is exactly the same kind of Markdown I’d be capturing in Drafts. I could easily turn this into a JSON payload and send it off.

Since I’m starting from a place where I’m capturing notes, it makes sense that notes would have an association with a source. The source could be a web article, a book, a movie, anything really. I could put a type field on sources to distinguish between mediums, if necessary. I could also pretty easily generate a citation for each note if I know the page and the source!

If I’m capturing a note on a web article, I’m probably going to need to create the source at the same time that I create the note. If I’m reading a book, there’s a good chance that I’ll need to find an existing source for the note.

At the time I’m creating a note, there’s two ways that I will be associating it with a source. I will either need to be creating the source at the same time, or I’ll need to find an existing source.

This workflow suggests that I’ll want to:

1. Capture the highlight and create a draft entry in Sanity
2. Get the URL for the newly created entry, then open its page in the browser
3. From there, I can associate the newly created note with a source and publish it.

I also want to be able to create a source from a URL or from an ISBN. This is a convenience feature and can come later!