51–60 of 129 posts
You can check out Anki[1]. Apart from the initial setup, you won't have to worry about taking care of the web server. I create separate decks for different fields and then only if necessary do I create subdecks. I also tag all the cards that I create and make sure to spend a lot of time to ensure that it's made and tagged properly. So, whenever I learn something new and I believe at that point of time that it's worth…
You would have to pry https://workflowy.com from my cold, dead hands. It's the best outliner I've ever used and they actively resist adding features that would only please a subset of users. It offers excellent cross-device synchronization and works nearly as well on a phone as it does in a browser or desktop app context. You can attach notes and share at the node level, either via read-only link or collaboration inv…
The wiki stores pages in simple text files that are easy to backup, it automatically calculates birthdays of my contacts (stored with semantic annotation in an XML style), and provides an Android App to synchronize all pages on a mobile phone. Many wiki pages are organized hiararchically, but most times I use the full text search.
Technically it runs with Java on any OS, and has a built-in web server.
Drafts (iOS and Mac) • quick thoughts I want to bang out before they dissolve. Drafts is focussed on being the fastest zero-to-blank-page experience on iOS, which makes it very handy for rapid spur of the moment universal capture.
Quiver (Mac) • I periodically review the above two, and catalogue them here for long term storage. There’s no structure to review, this is just my brain’s external HD.
You can check out Anki[1]. Apart from the initial setup, you won't have to worry about taking care of the web server. I create separate decks for different fields and then only if necessary do I create subdecks. I also tag all the cards that I create and make sure to spend a lot of time to ensure that it's made and tagged properly. So, whenever I learn something new and I believe at that point of time that it's worth…
I love anki, and I love this use of it, but how do you quickly make cards? Especially on mobile?
If you want more theory about Anki / Spaced repetition, https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition is the ultimate resource on topic
At some point, I ran across the idea that a library card catalog is really just a combined topical index for the entire collection, with each entry being a card. That seemed like a decent model, and I’ve been happy with it so far.
My system is currently a physical card index because I needed the flexibility of pen & paper to figure out how I wanted it to work, but I’ve been slowly computerizing it as I figure things out- you can certainly do something similar with flat text files, spreadsheets, or any other general purpose document software.
So now, I have three interacting systems: a citation list that records where I can find things to read them again, a combined topical index of everything I’ve read, and a flash card deck of things I want to remember without having to look them up.
When I run across an interesting article on the web, for instance, I save a PDF of it to Dropbox for safe keeping and print a copy to read away from my computer. As I read, I’ll make margin notes and have two different colors of highlighter: one to note index headings and another to mark passages to be turned into flash cards.
After my morning flash card review, I go through the material I read the previous day and turn all of the notes and highlights into cards(2). Once everything has been moved into the indexing system, I have no further need for the physical copy, so it goes to the recycler.
(1) Of sufficient length; generally 3 or more printed pages.
(2) Initially by hand, now with the aid of a custom piece of software
For more general knowledge, Semantic Mediawiki (http://pchr8.net/f/), but it's basically a big link database now. I can sort it by rating / complexity / to read / domains / keywords and found it quite flexible.
Also, Anki for things I want to memorize. https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition describes the theory quite well.
If it is for the long haul, plain text is the only way to go (org-mode, etc).
Any proprietary commercial solution will fade away in a handful of years. At best, you might be able to extract the content before they shut down but structure and metadata may be lost.
Open source self-hosted solutions will last much longer but even in that case it might get to a point the source has been abandoned so long that it becomes difficult to keep going.
Only plain text will survive. I have plenty of notes in a more or less organized directory tree, dating back to the late 80s.