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Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#241

Post by momentmaker »

I don't use this for keeping track of my creative thoughts but I use it for journaling.

I use Rocketbook. It's a physical notebook but you can also scan it and directly upload to your cloud storage of your choice.

It has 36-pages which you can erase with just a wet paper towel.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#243

Post by z3t4 »

dont worry. if the idea is any good it will come to you over and over again. i used to write down all my ideas. on paper, the phone, compter, notes. but when I look back at them i cant imagine how i thought they where good ideas. sometimes i get really good ideas from dreams. i have a pen and paper beside the bed. wake up to write it down. then go back to sleep.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#244

Post by exodust »

chubot wrote: post #179

A personal wiki that I wrote in 2004 (my first web app ever). It's one step above text files, and purposely no more than that. Hyperlinking and availability on different devices is important to me. It started as something like this (which amazingly is still online) http://infomesh.net/pwyky/ After 14 years, I have 3017 wiki pages of notes, and still use it every day!

This is a good strategy. To write your own thing, and not rely on Google and others, who insist that you log in and remain online just to write a simple note.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#245

Post by exodust »

ceidsness wrote: post #77
Martindm wrote: post #74

Nobody else mentioned it which really surprises me but I use Google Keep. Allows you to organise cards, colour code then, pin them and share them across devices. Anyone else use this? I find it's simple and restricted UI reduces distraction; just you and the idea. Also good for check lists, links and reminders.

You can also share Keep cards with other people's Gmail accounts.

And if "other people" don't have or want gmail accounts then tough luck? Doesn't sound like a valuable feature.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#246

Post by exodust »

chb wrote: post #95
Martindm wrote: post #74

Nobody else mentioned it which really surprises me but I use Google Keep. Allows you to organise cards, colour code then, pin them and share them across devices. Anyone else use this? I find it's simple and restricted UI reduces distraction; just you and the idea. Also good for check lists, links and reminders.

Google has a history of abandoning its projects ( https://gcemetery.co/ ). What formats does Keep export to?

Very true. The way they abandoned Picasa desktop was rotten. A family relative of mine, not tech savvy, loved Picasa. When Google killed it, and tried to replace it with "Google Photos" where everything must be put online, this was confirmation that Google wasn't fit for the task of offering dependable reliable software.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#247

Post by exodust »

faitswulff wrote: post #86
Martindm wrote: post #74

Nobody else mentioned it which really surprises me but I use Google Keep. Allows you to organise cards, colour code then, pin them and share them across devices. Anyone else use this? I find it's simple and restricted UI reduces distraction; just you and the idea. Also good for check lists, links and reminders.

I use Keep for everything. I just wish it 1) wasn't owned by Google and 2) started up faster. It lets me create searchable yet unstructured notes, lists, and photos. It's unbeatable in terms of simplicity and functionality.

> It's unbeatable

I highly doubt that. If it's just notes, you could make your own web app that did a similar job, without the bloat and unpredictable "product development cycles" of Google.

I mean, why tie your creative note-taking to "Google Corp"?

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#248

Post by tathagatadg »

I can completely relate to you and and I have ended up with step 3. I initially started with a slack for myself - but the free version is very limited for serious notetaking. After some research I settled with Zulip and hosted it on digital ocean.

Slack's UI is probably better, but zulip's UI is nice too. It offers multiple clients - web, ios, command line. I don't use the command line client as I find myself using the web much more.

I keep a tab open and when I am not in front of the computer I use my phone.

Of course, you need to be connected all the time. I write down take a picture and post it whenever I'm back online.

Search works right out of the box - though you wont get OCR for free like OneNote/Evernote. Something that I am looking forward to is writing (i)bots to automate some workflows (like ocr) (ii) integrate with other productivity tool chain - todoist and trello.

P.S. Its written in Python!

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#249

Post by chubot »

exodust wrote: post #244
chubot wrote: post #179

A personal wiki that I wrote in 2004 (my first web app ever). It's one step above text files, and purposely no more than that. Hyperlinking and availability on different devices is important to me. It started as something like this (which amazingly is still online) http://infomesh.net/pwyky/ After 14 years, I have 3017 wiki pages of notes, and still use it every day!

This is a good strategy. To write your own thing, and not rely on Google and others, who insist that you log in and remain online just to write a simple note.

Yes, I often think of how many note taking and bookmarking services have come and gone in the last 14 years :)

By sticking to a simple wiki that uses plain text, HTML, and HTTP, you avoid a lot of churn, and can concentrate on the real goal, which is organizing and retaining knowledge.

It started as a CGI script, migrated to a server I can no longer recall, then to my own web server (an experiment), and is now a WSGI app in Python running on gunicorn, behind Nginx.

It also started using flat files like pwyky, but now it uses sqlite.

All the data was undisturbed throughout those technology changes, which is the important part.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your creative thoughts?

#250

Post by prasanthmj »

I have dokuwiki installed on my macbook pro. Having a quick reference conveniently on local laptop is important for me because I should be able to access it even when offline. Having access to the wiki from different devices is not that important. Hence no cloud-based solution. The local wiki is added to the 'hosts' file. so http://mywiki in browser brings up the wiki quickly. Installing dokuwiki on mac is quite easy by the way. The sidebar of the wiki has items like: ideas, tomorrow, to-read, references, and items for each of the project I work on. When an idea strikes, I add an entry in the ideas folder . This helps because I know that it is 'filed' for later reference and as it is out of head, I can continue working on whatever I was working on. One advantage of the wiki over things like paper notebook is that it is quite searchable. For example, once I stumbled upon one video about a 'water from air' project (making water available in remote deserts by extracting water vapour from air). I filed it in a sub-page under "ideas " along with links that I could find. Then moved on. Didn't come back to it for quite some time. Then one day in some other discussion, the topic came up. It was quite easy to get back the links and references from the local wiki. The wiki pages are plain text files that I add to backup scripts (local and cloud). So it survived system failures in the past.
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