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Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

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Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#121

Post by edwintorok »

jpeloquin wrote: post #100
wenc wrote: post #34

This is what I learned from designing data architectures: If your data is variegated in format and form, don't look for a single tool/method solution to organize them. There is no single all-purpose organization method. Don't start with figuring out a method to organize your information. You will end up overengineering your org method. Instead, organize your information per "use-case". Start with a specific use-case/…

I endorse the idea that over-engineering is counterproductive. Focusing on principles over tools is good; tools come and go. My list of lessons learned (which has some overlap with yours) is: 1. Make sure your files and their organizational scheme can be transferred between tools. Your files need to be searchable, and at some point you will need portability. Text-based notes are easiest, but formats that have ubiquit…

I agree that spending time on tagging/categorizing everything is not worthwhile, I tried doing that for my Firefox bookmarks/Zotero, and ended up abandoning it in favour of search. Having said that it is useful to have a limited number of temporary categories:

- things I want to (re)read next

- "best" / "mind-blowing" technologies, usually built around a simple, minimalistic, but powerful concept (e.g. reagents for composable lock-free data structures, parallel prefix sum, Futamura projections, etc)

For everything else full-text search in Zotero has served me well.

About portability between tools I would go with Pandoc, it supports conversion between a number of Wiki formats and markdown, which should suffice for most purposes. Definitely avoid tools that lock you in their proprietary formats.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#123

Post by justinnhli »

kepano wrote: post #49

I went down a deep rabbit hole on this about a year ago. Nothing feels totally right but currently I use a mix of TiddlyWiki and Airtable. I haven't found a great solution for media outside of Dropbox but those two tools work well for text and data. TiddlyWiki is rather inscrutable at first, but extremely customizable and very thoughtfully architected. What I like most is that it is doesn't rely on an internet connec…

Can you say more about how you use Airtable? To me Airtable has a really appealing low/zero startup cost, but then I'm always tripped up by not being able to do arbitrary queries, joins, etc. to create new views.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#124

Post by I_complete_me »

se7entime wrote: post #56

Personally i can recommend http://zim-wiki.org/ you can organize the "media" think in "attachment" and tag them or create page about them, and you can still find the attachment in your file manager "Zim is a graphical text editor used to maintain a collection of wiki pages. Each page can contain links to other pages, simple formatting and images. Pages are stored in a folder structure, like in an outliner, and can ha…

zim-wiki for me, absolutely. Text-based, offline, decent plugins, cross-platform, easy. What I love is that if zim is not available I can use Sublime Text to view and navigate as a near replacement as long as the SidebarEnhancements plugin is installed. I stand by the supremacy of zim-wiki although it does lack "pretty".

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#126

Post by spicytunacone »

stevenleeg wrote: post #26

Personally I use vimwiki. It stores everything in plaintext files that I can search, keep track of in git, and also comes with quite a few useful features for building articles. The main downside, as someone else has mentioned here with org-mode, is the lack of a good mobile editor. This is something I’ve wanted to find time to fix for years but still haven’t had a chance.

How are you currently viewing/editing your wiki on mobile?

I sync to a server with vim and vimwiki installed and on my phone I just mosh[0] in. I don't generally do extensive editing on the go, though. Did the solution you have in mind include a specialized editor for touchscreens?

[0]: https://mosh.org/

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#127

Post by edwintorok »

wenc wrote: post #34

This is what I learned from designing data architectures: If your data is variegated in format and form, don't look for a single tool/method solution to organize them. There is no single all-purpose organization method. Don't start with figuring out a method to organize your information. You will end up overengineering your org method. Instead, organize your information per "use-case". Start with a specific use-case/…

Having a simple system that works efficiently for each use-case is a good idea, just be careful that organizing your notes doesn't become a goal [0] itself. It is much better to just start using some system, and see where you end up, even if it turns out you made a bad choice for your initial system you can always adapt mid-way (e.g. tools like `pandoc` can convert between a variety of formats), focus on the content and linking, not on the tools themselves.

[0] http://blog.dilbert.com/2013/11/18/goals-vs-systems/

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#128

Post by zoomablemind »

alexpetralia wrote: post #12
ahane wrote: post #6

Tiago Forte has a lot of thoughts on this topic and a partialy free/paid blog: https://www.fortelabs.co/ I'm not affiliated in any ways but his ideas a really well thought out and apparently thoroughly tested with clients.

I would highly recommend the idea of "personal knowledge management" (PKM). I started being much more organized on this front starting last year and it is a gamechanger. Personally I store raw thoughts and ideas in Keep, then transfer them daily or weekly to OneNote. Every so often I review the notes. I have notes from anything important I've ever learned, ranging from technology stacks to economics to capital market…

Very practical approach. Reviewing the saved info is what makes this real knowledge.

I find that any kind of knowledge search system eventually gets saturated and requires increasingly more time to scroll through partial hits to find what was asked. Our brains work the fastest in associative mode, it'd be nice to have some kind of associative storage (other than tags) that is personally biased/customized.

Reviewing the kept info is one way to refersh these associations in our organic minds.

But it'd be cool to ask your 'MindAssistant' to retrieve you the whole context of your recent or old idea, complete with your thought pathways: 'Hey, Mind, please remind me what was I thinking about the shapes of the clouds in the sky', '-Here's your Mindmap, thought-journey, and most important insights, Sir. At the conclusion of these thoughts, you read the following articles via HN...'

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#129

Post by edwintorok »

zubspace wrote: post #91
jasode wrote: post #55

>collected a large amount of ebooks, papers, articles, movies, pictures, etc. (all digital). Since you mentioned those specific examples, I see a commonality and so I'm going to assume you're primarily concerned about organizing files that are not authored/generated by you . (Except possibly pictures/photos since you might be talking about jpgs from your personal iPhone or digital camera.) This distinction is key bec…

> However, they have one exception to the "being bad at managing collections of the world's data that I didn't write" -- they do have very good "web clipping" functionality. Instead of saving url bookmarks that might suffer digital rot, you can use the web clip tool. Let me warn you: I tried to use OneNote this way. The web clipper is really nice and I used it heavily to clip everything interesting on the web from my…

Sometimes the pages can still be found on archive.org, archive.is, etc. but I usually find out too late that a page I bookmarked wasn't actually archived. I've just found this Firefox plugin [1] that automatically sends your bookmarks to archiving sites. (one at a time, so unfortunately this won't immediately help with existing bookmarks, unless you visit them all again).

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/archiveror/

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#130

Post by BrianOD »

I've just put this complete thread as a link into my Netsso, to study later. If I want to avoid future link rot, I tell Netsso to "save content" to my Dropbox/ GoogleDrive/OneDrive. In doing that, I could also click to encrypt each file separately, with a 40 character unique password,that only I know, and only decrypts on my local machine. Netsso remembers the passwords but only I know them !.It stores any type of document, any url. I load files from my computer to my Dropbox, and immediately link them to my Netsso, so I can access them on any device without formally opening the Dropbox. Online Note-making, with rich text, images included, even videos. Save any new urls with quick click/copy/paste. Add 400 character description to a link, to include in later search. Very sophisticated categorisation, sharing (even encrypted notes), drag/drop, inbuilt credentials for apps, etc (i.e password management included)...8000 links so far. Preview or Open on line, download, edit. Also I have a sharing version for Teams, with same functionality (plus encrypted Chat). Built for private,personal use - all my web knowledge available anywhere- but very easy to share links, or collections of links, if required. I can also Back Up complete collection to any computer in seconds, encrypted by my master password. Netsso seems to be a unique combination of bookmarker, online file creator and manager, internet file security enhancer and team collaborator.
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