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Managing my personal knowledge base

tkainrad.dev

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Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#61

Post by Pamar »

parisidau wrote: post #8

Any macOS users should check out DevonThink.

I have been perpetually sitting on the fence about Devon.

My use case: before Google+ folded I saved all my history there, because 99% of this was links to pages on stuff I found interesting/fun/relevant.

So now I have a large amount of urls (some will probably be defunct by now but it is not relevant). What I would like to do is to feed these urls to something (DevonThink?) that could access the article, and index it so that if - as an example - I want to prepare a RPG campaign on modern day pirates I can just write in the search box ["pirates" "shipping" "modern"] and hopefully get a list of web articles that are relevant.

Now, I know that Devon has some sort of automatic indexing/clustering facility for documents you have on your HD, but it is not really clear to me if it works also with stuff you only have an URL to.

(If anyone has some alternatives to suggest I will be very interested - I toyed with the idea of putting together an ElasticSearch VM for this but it remained on the backburner for years).

Here is my original request here, btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18882167

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#63

Post by jodrellblank »

lwhsiao wrote: post #54
romwell wrote: post #10

For managing a personal knowledge base, I highly recommend Tiddly Wiki[1] It's a self-contained Wiki/Notebook/Journal with tags, it works instantly, and all of it is in a single HTML file with magic JS in it. Or you can use it with a server. [1] https://tiddlywiki.com/

How well does Tiddlywiki scale? Would this single file support a large knowledge base accumulated over decades?

Jeremy Ruston the creator, says a 100MB TiddlyWiki works fine on a 2013 era laptop, and that browsers are some of the best optimized VMs available to work on (in the video I linked in another comment).

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#64

Post by harha »

ssivark wrote: post #48
Xunxi wrote: post #30

I use Microsoft's Onenote. You can literally do everything in the blog as well as audiovisual captures. All text is searchable. This video covers some of the things you can do with it in an academic setting but relatable. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JQD5c8A_D2g 0:33 - Math equations 1:45 - Replay text 2:45 - Ink to text 3:20 - Research tools 4:39 - Immersive reader 6:01 - Web clipper browser extension 7:12 - Save e…

I would love to get a Surface and use OneNote -- especially because it has excellent support for hand-written notes (and I much prefer hand-writing to typing). However, I'm hit in the face with two problems: 1. Uncertainty about data export. I don't want to be stuck depending on a third-party proprietary solution for something so important to me. (That said, Microsoft is typically quite good about supporting products…

Re 1. I would really not recommend using OneNote. I recently closed an Office 365 Business account and tried to move my notes on similar topics, e.g. pros/cons and how-tos of using different tools, from a group OneNote page to my own and it was very difficult to do so.

The documentation isn't very good (it's unclear which version) and I ended up having to install the local version on my Mac and manually copy/past the pages I wanted because the copy notebook dialog didn't work with notebooks that have many pages. The worst part is not being able to access the raw data and simply copy that from one place to another.

I've switched to markdown files on Sublime with the Markdown Editing package for now, because they are easier to read and edit, portable and I can convert my notes to wiki pages, blog posts or documentation very easily. I'm still not 100% happy because of the different flavours and how pandoc converts files differently sometimes (especially lists).

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#65

Post by travolter »

Why would you store all of this valuable information in a proprietary tool? What happens when notion shuts down, jacks up prices, makes feature changes you don't like, etc etc? Make some attempt to migrate all this data? It's gonna be hard to do this in an automated way, if they even have an (export) api for this. I'm using (vim)wiki/gollum and I feel much safer about my data.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#66

Post by simonebrunozzi »

bnj wrote: post #29

I’d like to look into the features of notion more, but I can’t help but wonder why it isn’t more common to see people using a local SQLite database, or any other self hosted database, to serve as a personal knowledge base management system. A lot of the paid solutions I’ve seen seem to bend over backwards to offer a limited subset of the features that are trivially available in an actual database. Has anyone tried ou…

It might be an unpopular opinion, but I use Notion and think that it's user interface is quite bad. I doubt they will go in the right direction for what I need. I moved to Notion from Evernote (spammy, terrible, no innovation for years) hoping for a better experience, but I am still unsatisfied. I will soon be looking for another solution.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#67

Post by romwell »

lwhsiao wrote: post #54
romwell wrote: post #10

For managing a personal knowledge base, I highly recommend Tiddly Wiki[1] It's a self-contained Wiki/Notebook/Journal with tags, it works instantly, and all of it is in a single HTML file with magic JS in it. Or you can use it with a server. [1] https://tiddlywiki.com/

How well does Tiddlywiki scale? Would this single file support a large knowledge base accumulated over decades?

Most of knowledge is text, maybe a picture here and there.

I, a lifetime worth of knowledge in reasonable HTML of Tiddly Wiki would take less toll on your PC then the current CNN front page.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#68

Post by shakna »

hydrox24 wrote: post #32
whalesalad wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you recommend running it? The install guide lists a half-dozen different possibilities including PHP, Node, Ruby which all look to be vastly different solutions.

You just download the HTML file and open it to 'run' it. Then, once you've made changes, use your browsers "save as" feature to save a copy. Everything is in browser. Other options do things like public hosting. Personally, I just use the HTML file with the Timimi Firefox plugin installed for autosaving the current file.

> use your browsers "save as" feature to save a copy

> Don't attempt to use the browser File/Save menu option to save changes (it doesn't work)

It looks like TiddlyWiki doesn't recommend that exact method anymore.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#69

Post by henriks »

travolter wrote: post #65

Why would you store all of this valuable information in a proprietary tool? What happens when notion shuts down, jacks up prices, makes feature changes you don't like, etc etc? Make some attempt to migrate all this data? It's gonna be hard to do this in an automated way, if they even have an (export) api for this. I'm using (vim)wiki/gollum and I feel much safer about my data.

Fully agree. I was turned off notion for the same reason and reverted back to self-hosting dokuwiki. A much more limited feature set, to be sure, but at least I'll still have my notes 10 years from now.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#70

Post by romwell »

whalesalad wrote: post #23
romwell wrote: post #10

For managing a personal knowledge base, I highly recommend Tiddly Wiki[1] It's a self-contained Wiki/Notebook/Journal with tags, it works instantly, and all of it is in a single HTML file with magic JS in it. Or you can use it with a server. [1] https://tiddlywiki.com/

How do you recommend running it? The install guide lists a half-dozen different possibilities including PHP, Node, Ruby which all look to be vastly different solutions.

I would recommend just downloading the HTML file and using that.

To save changes, click the red checkmark, and "save as..." the updated HTML over the old copy.

Switch to other possibilities if you use it enough to justify that.

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