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Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

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241–250 of 304 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#241

I have a personal "knowledge base" that is publicly available at https://maxmasnick.com/kb/ . This is partially inspired by Chris Albon's excellent data science technical notes: http://chrisalbon.com . I find it very helpful to have this kind of information on a public website. It's easy to search myself, quick to edit[^1], and helpful for sharing with others when someone asks me a question. For notes I don't want to…

“ I use the GitHub Actions beta to automatically update the public site every time I commit to master.” How do you set that up?

It's somewhat convoluted and custom to my specific hosting setup (I use https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net because I want an Apache server so I can use complex redirects). Essentially, the GitHub Action builds the site and then copies it over to NFSN. This is all done in a Docker container.

The only potentially interesting part about this setup is I take advantage of this git feature I didn't know about until I set this up: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree. This lets you essentially check out a branch into a folder in a repo. Hugo can then build the site in to the special folder, and the built site is committed just to that branch. I then push this branch to NFSN, rather than using rsync or scp, which takes a lot longer for small changes compared with sending a git delta over the wire.

I plan to write up a more extensive description of this when GitHub Actions come out of beta. If you want to hear about it when it comes out, you can subscribe to my blog's newsletter: https://masnick.blog/subscribe/

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ I use the GitHub Actions beta to automatically update the public site every time I commit to master.” How do you set that up?

I haven't tried GitHub Actions yet, but Netlify makes this very easy to do.

Yes, unless you have my weird requirement to use an Apache server, I think something like Netlify or GitHub Pages makes way more sense.

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#243
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ I use the GitHub Actions beta to automatically update the public site every time I commit to master.” How do you set that up?

Very interested in this as well. How do you do automatic deployments?

I described this briefly in a reply to the parent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21316442

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ I use the GitHub Actions beta to automatically update the public site every time I commit to master.” How do you set that up?

If it's not too much to ask, I would add on here that I'd like to see your Hugo setup. I've been learning it recently but the examples I find are all rather simple. Just seeing what you've done gives me some ideas of how you did it, and I'll work on figuring it out - but information on how you organize things before hugo generates the site would be greatly appreciated.

Unfortunately I don't have a good way to reveal the source of my site as there are some things in that git repo that can't be made public.

I too have struggled to find examples of doing more complex things in Hugo. It's such a versatile tool that it's probably pretty hard to document everything in an approachable way.

I may write up how I set up the Hugo portion of the knowledge base as it has worked quite well. If I do, you can subscribe here to make sure you see it: https://masnick.blog/subscribe/

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#245

I have a personal "knowledge base" that is publicly available at https://maxmasnick.com/kb/ . This is partially inspired by Chris Albon's excellent data science technical notes: http://chrisalbon.com . I find it very helpful to have this kind of information on a public website. It's easy to search myself, quick to edit[^1], and helpful for sharing with others when someone asks me a question. For notes I don't want to…

Out of curiosity how much traffic does the personal kb get?

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#246
I use Emacs Org mode in a git repository hosted on my Raspberry Pi. On my phone, I use Orgzly to edit the files, along with Termux to manage the git repo. I also use Termux to launch Emacs from time to time when I need an advanced operation not yet supported by Orgzly.

I keep sensitive files encrypted using GnuPG and my private key lives on a Nitrokey Pro (a GnuPG token).

I usually export to various formats with Org mode built-in exporters (mainly ascii, markdown, html and pdf) but I sometimes use Pandoc, especially to export to docx.

I have even started blogging with that system. I can edit an Org file on my phone using Orgzly or Emacs, and then use Termux to automatically 1. push the change to my Git repo 2. publish the files to html using Emacs in batch mode 3. send the html/css files to my website using a bash script and sftp.

I don't think I will ever look back :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#247

I have a personal "knowledge base" that is publicly available at https://maxmasnick.com/kb/ . This is partially inspired by Chris Albon's excellent data science technical notes: http://chrisalbon.com . I find it very helpful to have this kind of information on a public website. It's easy to search myself, quick to edit[^1], and helpful for sharing with others when someone asks me a question. For notes I don't want to…

I got excited then for OneNote on Linux (Kubuntu) but a quick search suggests it's only available with a few hacky kludges and WINE?

I use OneNote on KDE Neon in a Windows 10 virtualbox. Yes, it's not the most efficient but I have found this approach much faster than using the sluggish web UI for OneNote. I also use my Windows 10 virtualbox for the rest of the MS Office suite through a university subscription, so I feel it justifies the 30GB of disk space it takes.

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#248
post #245

I have a personal "knowledge base" that is publicly available at https://maxmasnick.com/kb/ . This is partially inspired by Chris Albon's excellent data science technical notes: http://chrisalbon.com . I find it very helpful to have this kind of information on a public website. It's easy to search myself, quick to edit[^1], and helpful for sharing with others when someone asks me a question. For notes I don't want to…

Out of curiosity how much traffic does the personal kb get?

Essentially zero. It's not well-advertised, and I only started it in earnest earlier this year.

My Technical Notes blog (https://tech-notes.maxmasnick.com), which is a similar idea but much more random in content, does get a fair bit of traffic on specific pages, presumably via organic search traffic. (This is the most popular Tech Notes page, which has had 30k views over the last 4 years: https://tech-notes.maxmasnick.com/ipython-notebooks-automati...)

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#249

I have a personal "knowledge base" that is publicly available at https://maxmasnick.com/kb/ . This is partially inspired by Chris Albon's excellent data science technical notes: http://chrisalbon.com . I find it very helpful to have this kind of information on a public website. It's easy to search myself, quick to edit[^1], and helpful for sharing with others when someone asks me a question. For notes I don't want to…

I am impressed. Whenever I try to build a tree of thoughts, I run into the problem that I want things to fall under multiple categories. I might start by classifying them according to subject area (as you have done), but then I might want a collection of those notes to also fall under "could help with project X" or "would be of interest to person Y" or "can be learned from reference Z" or any number of things.

This is what links were originally invented for.

Re: Ask HN: How do you share/organize knowledge at work and life?

#250
post #193

I have a personal "knowledge base" that is publicly available at https://maxmasnick.com/kb/ . This is partially inspired by Chris Albon's excellent data science technical notes: http://chrisalbon.com . I find it very helpful to have this kind of information on a public website. It's easy to search myself, quick to edit[^1], and helpful for sharing with others when someone asks me a question. For notes I don't want to…

No mention of KeePass under password managers?!

I'm only interested in password managers with good desktop, web, and mobile support.
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