🧠 Sharpen your thinking with a second brain
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🧠 Sharpen your thinking with a second brain

Oct 26, 2023·
Quan Nguyen
Quan Nguyen
· 2 min read
Image credit: Unsplash
blog

Create a personal knowledge base and share your knowledge with your peers.

Hugo Blox web framework empowers you with one of the most flexible note-taking capabilities out there.

Create a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.

Use it as your second brain, either publicly sharing your knowledge with your peers via your website, or via a private GitHub repository and password-protected site just for yourself.

Mindmaps

Hugo Blox supports a Markdown extension for mindmaps.

With this open format, can even edit your mindmaps in other popular tools such as Obsidian.

Simply insert a Markdown code block labelled as markmap and optionally set the height of the mindmap as shown in the example below.

Mindmaps can be created by simply writing the items as a Markdown list within the markmap code block, indenting each item to create as many sub-levels as you need:


```markmap {height="200px"}
- Hugo Modules
  - Hugo Blox
  - netlify
  - netlify-cms
  - slides
```

renders as

- Hugo Modules
  - Hugo Blox
  - netlify
  - netlify-cms
  - slides

Anh here’s a more advanced mindmap with formatting, code blocks, and math:


```markmap
- Mindmaps
  - Links
    - [Hugo Blox Docs](https://docs.hugoblox.com/)
    - [Discord Community](https://discord.gg/z8wNYzb)
    - [GitHub](https://github.com/HugoBlox/kit)
  - Features
    - Markdown formatting
    - **inline** ~~text~~ *styles*
    - multiline
      text
    - `inline code`
    - Math: $x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}$
```

renders as

- Mindmaps
  - Links
    - [Hugo Blox Docs](https://docs.hugoblox.com/)
    - [Discord Community](https://discord.gg/z8wNYzb)
    - [GitHub](https://github.com/HugoBlox/kit)
  - Features
    - Markdown formatting
    - **inline** ~~text~~ *styles*
    - multiline
      text
    - `inline code`
    - Math: $x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}$

Highlighting

Highlight important text with mark:

<mark>Highlighted text</mark>

Callouts

Use callouts (aka asides, hints, or alerts) to draw attention to notes, tips, and warnings.

Use the > [!NOTE] syntax to create a callout.

> [!NOTE]
> A Markdown aside is useful for displaying notices, hints, or definitions to your readers.

renders as

Note

A Markdown aside is useful for displaying notices, hints, or definitions to your readers.

Or use the warning callout type so your readers don’t miss critical details:

Warning

A Markdown aside is useful for displaying notices, hints, or definitions to your readers.

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Second Brain Markdown
Quan Nguyen
Authors
Quan Nguyen
Assistant Professor of Computing Science

I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Thompson Rivers University. My research centers on the impact of generative AI on the learning behavior and outcome in computer science education. Before joining TRU, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the UBC Master of Data Science, where I developed and taught a variety of data science courses, including those on statistical inference, machine learning, and technical communication. In addition to teaching, I coordinated the capstone program, facilitating student collaborations with industry partners on real-world data science projects.

Prior to UBC, I worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Learning Analytics at the School of Information, University of Michigan. My research focuses on analyzing students social interactions and peer effects from spatio-temporal large scale data. My work has been recognized with competitive grants, and multiple best paper awards at prominent conferences, including LAK18 and HCI International 17.

I hold a PhD in Learning Analytics at The Open University UK, a BSc and MSc in Economics from Maastricht University, Netherlands.