I’ve been finding nested page names incredibly useful for things like locations and some events. Doing so I can make it so any instance of a place in a city or province is indexable at each level.
[[location, [[city, [[region, [[country]]]]]]]]
When creating a page, you simply add nested square brackets and it becomes a page link within a page link. You can do it multiple layers deep which is how I get the layering effect you see above where I can click on Casa Loma or Toronto or Ontario, and each will appear whenever the page is used.
To get the example in the gif, I did:
[[ Legends of Horror, [[Casa Loma, [[Toronto, [[Ontario]]]]]]
Just be careful you don’t overuse them. Clicking a nested link takes you to the nested page from any level (I could click Ontario from anywhere Casa Loma, Toronto, Ontario is used). This can make for really confusing clicking if you use it randomly throughout.
In particular, this is useful for ordered data with clear separators, like addresses, where the comma serves to separate nested links.
When nested pages for locations has been useful
This has been especially powerful when researching places to travel or live.
Whenever I take a note of an event that happened in some location, or activity to do, or home I liked for rent or sale, I can easily nest it under the location.
Looking at the location’s references, I can see all sorts of events, places, and facts I’ve tagged nearby.
Right now, my research is highly specific to a particular project, but eventually, I may find a use for these notes when planning a trip or generally researching.
For example, I took a trip to Kincardine 2 years ago. If I had put memories and photos into Roam, I could come across that while researching places nearby.
By making it easy and automatic to tag locations, I make it easy and automatic to allow lookups by location in Roam.
Don’t go overboard with this.
The main benefit of nested pages is automatically tagging the entire taxonomy of a location. This can work against you if you use it too much.
I’ve experimented using this with certain “types” of pages that I often create. For example, new projects, practices, and goals.
[[Publish 30 Atomic Essays ([[Goals]])]]
[[Buy a house ([[Goals]])
[[rethink my apartment living space ([[project]])]]
At first, I liked this because it made it clear what this page was wherever it was, and I thought it would make index pages for all my projects or Goals.
What I didn’t think about however was that the automatic tagging I mentioned earlier would happen to each of my labels. Pretty soon, my [[Projects]] page references were so cluttered, I had to change it to [[project]] to separate it out.
Now, I’m considering removing the project page entirely, and just changing it to:
[[rethink my apartment living space (Project)]]
Ultimately, it comes down to if I find a use for the page or if it’s a hindrance.
These are just a few ideas on how you can add layers of organization on top of Roam.
If you have any ideas or questions about how to use Roam, please share down below! 👇