Show HN: Open-Source Memex – Alternative Approach to Roam/Obsidian
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Re: Show HN: Open-Source Memex – Alternative Approach to Roam/Obsidian
#2This blog is a summary of a fun 1 month adventure I had with Knowledge Management Systems and building a POC that I thought had potential. It was inspired by so many of the products I see on Hacker News.
I’ve open sourced all the code + written down some notes on my insights/ architecture. Just a warning, the code leaves much to be desired as this was a mini project over 2-3 weekends.
At the moment, I have 3 key layers of the application.
The first is Chrome Extension which allows data collection. It tracks all sorts of data such as attention, time on page, scroll/ click and hover behaviour. It then sends this data to the Electron app.
The Electron app receives this data through an API and saves it down locally using PouchDB (data structure is compatible with Apache CouchBD and thus allows easy cloud storage).
Within the Electron app, I use an Express/ NodeJS web server to expose endpoints for functionality with the front end/ receiving data from Chrome Extension.
For the front end I use ReactJS.
If you’re interested, please read the full article! There are lots of videos of the application in action.
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Memex – Alternative Approach to Roam/Obsidian
#3I was worried about yet another note taking app post on HN but I have to admit the Chrome Extension/Inbox part is a fresh idea and really intriguing.
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Memex – Alternative Approach to Roam/Obsidian
#4This blog is a summary of a fun 1 month adventure I had with Knowledge Management Systems and building a POC that I thought had potential. It was inspired by so many of the products I see on Hacker News. I’ve open sourced all the code + written down some notes on my insights/ architecture. Just a warning, the code leaves much to be desired as this was a mini project over 2-3 weekends. At the moment, I have 3 key laye…
Do you then sync to a real CouchDB? Or, do you use PouchDB server on the backend, or otherwise?
I'm interested in understanding how you eventually translate to Graph4j and how you do authentication. Where can I look for this?
This is really, really cool that you open sourced this. Thank you.
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Memex – Alternative Approach to Roam/Obsidian
#5This blog is a summary of a fun 1 month adventure I had with Knowledge Management Systems and building a POC that I thought had potential. It was inspired by so many of the products I see on Hacker News. I’ve open sourced all the code + written down some notes on my insights/ architecture. Just a warning, the code leaves much to be desired as this was a mini project over 2-3 weekends. At the moment, I have 3 key laye…
This is neat. I had a similar idea of tracking what we read online in the browser. In addition to just recording time spent and links followed, I would also archive every article read to automatically build up a personal library of the articles themselves. Additionally, light weight note taking on the articles themselves ala hypothe.is
Unfortunately a new baby has drained all my time for such pursuits.
Hope you develop your concept further!
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Memex – Alternative Approach to Roam/Obsidian
#6I was worried about yet another note taking app post on HN but I have to admit the Chrome Extension/Inbox part is a fresh idea and really intriguing.
Thanks man! I really appreciate it :-)
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Memex – Alternative Approach to Roam/Obsidian
#7I'm really glad you put a lot of focus into automatically tracking the things the user is likely interested in. I tried using Obsidian, but it felt like I was spending more effort remembering to save information and create proper back-links than I was actually retaining any information.
I've recently started working on something similar as an excuse to learn machine learning, but it's still mostly vaporware outside the firefox extension I wrote. I think that by saving some basic metadata (when a page was viewed, what browser was used to view it), and using ML to judge how similar the contents of a page is to another, it should be able to automatically create links between related information. Ideally, it'd be able to handle information outside the browser. For example, if a log file is saved, then a web page is viewed with similar contents to the log file, it would be able to detect that the web page is probably a reference for the log file.
Like I said, it's mostly vaporware, but I think that products like these are going to be the future of collaboration tools.
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Memex – Alternative Approach to Roam/Obsidian
#8This blog is a summary of a fun 1 month adventure I had with Knowledge Management Systems and building a POC that I thought had potential. It was inspired by so many of the products I see on Hacker News. I’ve open sourced all the code + written down some notes on my insights/ architecture. Just a warning, the code leaves much to be desired as this was a mini project over 2-3 weekends. At the moment, I have 3 key laye…
This is neat. I had a similar idea of tracking what we read online in the browser. In addition to just recording time spent and links followed, I would also archive every article read to automatically build up a personal library of the articles themselves. Additionally, light weight note taking on the articles themselves ala hypothe.is Unfortunately a new baby has drained all my time for such pursuits. Hope you devel…
Awesome that we came up with similar ideas!
So right now, the Chrome Extension tracks all link clicks as well so the visualisation actually builds relationships between articles/ blogs/ anything else you read on the internet.
I also had another idea that once we build our Knowledge Maps, we should be able to compare and share it will one another.
For instance, I'd love to see what our software engineers around my age/ experience are reading and the insights they are drawing from articles.
Obviously some sort of security/ privacy mechanism will need to be implemented as well.
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Memex – Alternative Approach to Roam/Obsidian
#9This blog is a summary of a fun 1 month adventure I had with Knowledge Management Systems and building a POC that I thought had potential. It was inspired by so many of the products I see on Hacker News. I’ve open sourced all the code + written down some notes on my insights/ architecture. Just a warning, the code leaves much to be desired as this was a mini project over 2-3 weekends. At the moment, I have 3 key laye…
Do you then sync to a real CouchDB? Or, do you use PouchDB server on the backend, or otherwise? I'm interested in understanding how you eventually translate to Graph4j and how you do authentication. Where can I look for this? This is really, really cool that you open sourced this. Thank you.
No worries! I'm always leeching from the open source community so I'd thought to give back haha.
The visualisation library I'm using is by Ant Design (Alibaba).
You can see some examples below from the documentation.
https://g6.antv.vision/en/examples/gallery
Re syncing with real CouchDB - I haven't implemented that yet but from what I read, its definitely possible with PouchDB.
Re I have a bunch of Express APIs that expose PouchDB so I can do basic CRUD operations such as creating resources etc.
Re: Show HN: Open-Source Memex – Alternative Approach to Roam/Obsidian
#10This blog is a summary of a fun 1 month adventure I had with Knowledge Management Systems and building a POC that I thought had potential. It was inspired by so many of the products I see on Hacker News. I’ve open sourced all the code + written down some notes on my insights/ architecture. Just a warning, the code leaves much to be desired as this was a mini project over 2-3 weekends. At the moment, I have 3 key laye…
Forgot to add: It also tracks what you click so it can build relationships between articles/ blogs/ anything else you read on the internet.
For example, if I’m reading an article about big data/ ETL pipelines and then I click on a link from within the article to a resource on machine learning, this relationship should be tracked and digested.