Pages vs Blocks

General
1

I had a little bit of curiosity yesterday so asked the following question regarding pages vs blocks in the Discord. I thought I would copy it here, together with some helpful responses and points of view from other members hoping they can generate some ideas to others facing the same conundrum.

The question was:

How do you decide whether to use blocks (indents) vs pages?
For example I have a page with a list of the series / films I have watched and want to have things like start and end watch dates and a brief synopsis etc.

I have typically created new pages for each show and film and added the relevant content there. I played around with having the information in blocks instead of new pages which generated the question of how others went about deciding.

The following responses / thoughts were received:

@sabre23t usually decides on the pages vs blocks on these factors:

  1. If I want to link to it by name, it’ll be a Page. Since blocks can only be linked by UID from a selection list.
  2. If I want to easily manage/export a group of blocks together, I keep all those blocks as a page.

He tends to err towards having fewer pages, splitting groups of blocks into additional pages later as and when necessary.

@tony365 is also of the inclination to have as little pages as possible, and mostly uses blocks.

@tienson goes the slightly more radical route of only creating pages to compose the output article.
He stores almost everything in the journal pages and uses both templates and block properties for filtering.

@cannibalox goes along the route of logging watched movies / series in journal pages as : DONE #watched [[title [[year]]]]. This results in every movie having its own page using a template with general info such as director, writer, dp, cast, storyline, rating etc. Having stress-tested the load times of many blocks on a page vs a new page, he opted for the latter.

He also makes the good point that pages show up in the graph whilst blocks do not (at least for the time being)"

All in all, think I will play around with it some more and then see what works best for me but it was helpful to get some other points of view to refine my workflow.

Hope you find the above useful and please feel free to add your thoughts and comments and how you decide on pages vs blocks.

Thanks

9 Likes
2

My own personal razor for this is if it’s a distinct topic that can be named.

That’s usually a good bar for me to see if it occupies enough mental space and if there are enough legs to pump out more than just 2-3 bullets on! Otherwise, it should be able to go inside an existing page. Of course, if I’ve never ever written about X or anything related to X before, then it’ll warrant a new page.

2 Likes
3

I think what the logseq should do, in addition to considering how to better build blocks or pages, is how it can easily convert blocks to pages and pages to block， and can ensure that reference relationship are not lost during the conversion process.

3 Likes
4

Seems that the conundrum remains. More thoughts and links here.