Evergreen Notes: Short-form content for WordPress

Inspired from Zettelkasten, a card is a self-contained unit of information that is likely to be closely related to the concepts and topics you are working with.

How to use cards on your website

Keep your website updated

Run a Twitter-like feed on your website where you publish new cards daily. Compile the week’s best cards into a weekly newsletter.

Reuse cards in Articles

When audiences see the same cards being reused to support arguments, this spaced repetition is world-view building for them.

Find related content

On clicking the Retweet icon, audiences see a list of all pages where this card has been used and it acts as a form of reference or citation.

Visualize your grand theory

Use system maps to showcase how everything is connected to everything else. For e.g., how energy access → livelihoods → health.

Be reliable source of facts

Collect all cards, such as facts, charts, quotes, ideas, and examples, on each topic in a filterable dashboard.

Encourage audiences to use cards

Just like users can take a piece of YouTube, Twitter, etc. to social conversations and blogs, encourage users to take your cards too.

Why publish short-form content?

Audience’s online are reading more short-form than ever. Hence, YouTube released Shorts, Instagram released Reels, and why News Inshorts is a success despite mainstream media. With Cards, you too can publish short-form content in your WordPress.

Give control back to audiences. Let them consume your information in chunks of 1-2 minute each.

Between long-form releases, maintain top-of-the-mind recall with audiences by publishing cards daily.

Convert daily back-end work — reading, writing, understanding — into audience-facing cards.

What kind of cards can you produce?

Create concise, information-rich cards by asking your team to:

Annotate their daily reading — papers, books, news articles, and blogs — into interesting quotes, ideas, news events, and examples.
Write original opinions, takes, or summaries of their readings.
Break snippets of information (e.g. charts) from your long-form into Cards

You can then organize these cards into clear buckets. For example, in his blog ritvvij.parrikh.com, Ritvvij converts his daily reading into following buckets:

Backdrop,
Causality, Challenges, Characteristics, Comparison,
Data,
Event, Example,
Fact, Fun side,
How it works, How to,
List,
Output,
Pros and cons,
Quote,
System map,
Take, Types,
Why, What if, What is/are

How to make good cards?

Optimize for insight density, i.e., number of AHA! moments per 50 words. Here’s a good example: Marketing guru Seth Godin created three 2-minute podcast episodes.