I currently have 100 evergreen and 494 literature notes in my Roam database, so discovery has become a problem. I do create "maps of content" in order to more easily track the notes and organize them in topics, but I wanted to have Readwise-like note resurfacing. I wanted to resurface notes, like how Readwise resurfaces highlights. Thankfully, this is possible with the Roam API.
I tag my evergreen notes with the #e tag, by adding a "meta" bullet on top of them:
- Meta::
- Category:: #e
- Relevant notes::
- Created at:: <%DATE%>
In order to resurface these notes in my daily notes, I wanted to randomly select five notes that contain the #e tag.
Here’s how to do that with the Roam API:
window.roamAlphaAPI.q(`[
:find (pull ?referencingBlock [:block/page])
:in $ ?pagetitle
:where
[?referencingBlock :block/refs ?referencedPage]
[?referencedPage :node/title ?pagetitle]
]`,"e")
.map(page => window.roamAlphaAPI.pull("[:node/title]", page[0].page.id))
.sort(() => 0.5 - Math.random())
.map(result => `[[${result[":node/title"]}]]`).slice(0, 5)
Put this in a SmartBlock and you’re good to go: