Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

I use NValt [0] and plain text files for all my personal notes/info tracking system. I use 1Writer [1] to access/add to it from iOS, and on Mac I either use NValt itself or Deft [2] in emacs. I try to convert any visual information into a textual tip, otherwise, most images, PDFs and ebooks go to Dropbox while I'm actively reading or are in "pending", after being read they go to long term storage.

  [0] http://www.brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt
  [1] http://1writerapp.com
  [2] https://github.com/jrblevin/deft

I generally control the organization of stuff by the way it comes in, and then have a secondary means to have media organized that comes in from a non-standard ingress.

Most information is stored in of 3 ways

  1. Synced to a NextCloud instance running on a VPS.
  2. Synced to a home NAS running Syncthing (though I may change this to IPFS at somepoint).
  3. Added to Wallabag (A read it later like service)

Notes, List & Project based Todos

These are put into Orgmode which syncs with Owncloud. I can then use the WebDav endpoint to pull the files to add or edit on my phone.

Articles/Papers

These get added to wallabag then are accessed via an RSS reader.

Personal Documentation

Added with Camscanner, OCRed, and added to NextCloud. At some point I will probably also store these on my NAS, so I can extracted the OCRed text as a text file so I can search them, but currently the collection is to small to justify this.

Media

My NAS handles most of this, and organizes it using Emby. Syncthing is my secondary means for this, and Emby watches the directory to organize this.

eBooks

Syncthing to add to the server. A headless calibre instance then organizes it.

Pictures

Most pictures come my from my phone, nextcloud will automatically sync these. If the pictures are part of notes, then instead they go into Orgmode, which works with images as well.

There are a couple of other organizational thing that use Syncthing + Organize, but nothing of major note.

This is not A single cohesive system but several scoped systems with a standardize way to add content to organize (e.g. folders). Searching the content is generally done via plain text searches, or inside of the application that manages that context (see emby & calibri).

Links

  1. https://github.com/nextcloud/server
  2. https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing
  3. https://github.com/tfeldmann/organize
  4. https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag
  5. https://www.camscanner.com/
  6. https://beorgapp.com/
  7. https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/server.html
  8. https://emby.media/

For Android systems there is Orgzly. http://www.orgzly.com/

For iOS another possible option is Editorial. There are some script addons convert orgmode to MD ↔ ORG. This is incredibly hacky though, and I'm unsure how it works.

I use beorg but it still needs a lot of work to be what I'm looking for honestly.

Same here, pinboard and notion are a great combo. I use NewsBlur for feeds, but wish pinboard would integrate that.

The biggest disappointment with Notion is that there is no on-prem. I would've rammed it through at work by now if there were. I've searched high and low for a comparable open-source alternative, and the best I get is outline: https://getoutline.com, but it's got a long way left to go.

problem is inline screenshots