Matt's Roof Garden
Powered by 🌱Roam GardenReadwise Roam integration feedback
Not sure this is the correct address to send beta feedback to but it's the one I had on file. If this is the incorrect person my apologies and please forward it to the correct one.
I got the secret link to the Readwise → Rome integration this week and have been playing around with it and exploring the different options. Very excited to have these two work together.
Here's some unsolicited feedback from a person who uses Roam a lot :)
The "Customize Roam page metadata" option is excellent and I think it should be pushed further and extended to cover every aspect of the highlight sync
I keep and reference a lot of highlights in my Roam writing, and now with Readwise integration I'm about to keep a lot more. I've been thinking about how best to make sure all of these highlights are associated within Roam so they can be accessed by Roam's queries
Right now all the imported quotes are under a block titled "Highlights first synced by #``Readwise". This has several, maybe unintended, side effects
Readwise page Linked References are cluttered. Because all of the synced quote pages link back to the central Readwise page any of my own writing that references Readwise is lost in the 100s of book & article pages. It's not even possible to filter these out of the linked references unless a custom tag is added to the page title ( an ugly solution in my opinion )
Because of the block structure I don't believe it is possible to use block queries to find only highlights. Querying based on the imported highlight tags is possible but not based on the actual text of the highlight. This could be useful when trying to find references to a word or phrase only from other people's writing. One option would be to allow the customization of that parent block title. If, for example, the parent was an attribute or tag named quotes then a query could be put together to find all quotes from a specific author or with a specific tag beyond just ones imported and marked Readwise
would it be possible to customize the block the quotes are under?
Page title suffix is an interesting option and I would like to also see an option for a Page title prefix. This would allow for users to utilize Roam's native namespaces. While the Roam feature isn't fully fleshed out right now it allows for filtering and querying of page types by, for example, omitting any pages that start with Book/.
Namespaces can also be targeted with custom CSS to, for example, put a little Readwise icon in front of any page imported with readwise.
Right now the sync history is appended to the Readwise page. While this seems logical it also pollutes a page that may contain other writing or information related to Readwise. For example I have been using the Readwise page to write about different workflows as well as put together comments and feedback for the readwise team ( just like this email ).
I see several different solution options
Always append the sync history under the same block titled Sync History or something similar.
Though I have heard that targeting specific blocks is difficult right now since the Roam API isn't out yet
Create a separate page for the Readwise sync history
Could use namespaces [[``Readwise/Sync]]
Could use double linked pages [[[[``Readwise]] Sync]]
For it to be most versatile allowing the user to customize what page the sync history is added to would be ideal
Under each highlight Tags, Note, and Chapter Note information is only bolded text and not stored as an attribute. If these were attributes the info would be associated and attached to the referenced highlight.
Full titles are not encoded correctly sometimes
Days of Blood & Starlight comes in as Days of Blood & Starlight
Is a highlight re-synced if you add a tag or edit it from within Readwise?
Some stylistic feedback - these are 100% personal preference
The chapter titles for each set of quotes is set as H3 which makes them very large compared to the surrounding text.
There should be an option for all synced highlights to be surrounded by quotations to denote that they are not your own words and are someone else's. In a database the contains a lot of original writing I find it important to delineate between my ideas and the ideas of others.