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Managing my personal knowledge base

tkainrad.dev

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Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#81

Post by dgsb »

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…

I use airtable now when I need to have structured data. I use tiddly for note taking and enhanced bookmark management.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#82

Post by tkainrad »

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/

I would love an alternative that is free/and or possible to self-host.

However, I do not see how this compares to Notion. How do I edit this HTML file on my phone? How do I add bookmarks to it via a hotkey? What is the equivalent of Notion's databases? Does it have Slash commands? This list of questions could go on for much longer. I really don't want to sound like a Notion shill, especially since I also use other tools (e.g. GitLab) for my knowledge base, but many of the suggested alternatives lack basically all the features that I describe in my post.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#83

Post by dgsb »

romwell wrote: post #70
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.

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.

That's the save method I'm using since one year now. It perfectly fits my needs as a single user of this wiki. No infrastructure to set up, it works out of the box. As a former ikiwiki user I won't go back.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#84

Post by metachris »

dross wrote: post #74

A little surprised that after 64 comments I've only seen 2 instances of Evernote mentioned. I recently went back to using it and have been making use of the clipper fairly often. https://twitter.com/dalevross/status/1214257684863692806 https://www.evernote.com/l/AVVHBrGz_9BPMbh_Oxgp8qpibzVtX0tRn... I also found https://dabble.me/ the other day which seemed like a nice slot in for quick thoughts with the ability to em…

I've worked with Evernote a lot, but handling source code snippets is really painful. Got me switching to Notion too.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#85

Post by AJRF »

tkainrad wrote: post #72
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.

Obviously, you have a point. I am indeed a little bit worried. Some things that ease my mind: Notion's export and backup features are quite good. You can export everything in various formats, markdown being the most relevant for me. This only becomes messy with complex databases that use formulas and are related to each other. You would not have these with local solutions in the first place. Notion is already profita…

Have you actually done an export of your Notion workspace?

I looked at their options before using Notion and was happy they had a full export available - but then I actually went ahead and used it because they are putting zero focus into improving the performance of the apps - and the export format is a horrific mess!

They split out code blocks from your notes in separate notes, the filenames are a mess and images aren't saved inline (as they could be with something like base64).

For workspaces of any reasonable size, you're going to be doing a lot of work to make the export actually useful outside the context of Notion - which should be obvious given how they treat things as blocks (and all the abstractions that come with that make it into their underlying data structures)

They've also been saying the "API is coming soon" for about a year now.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#86

Post by dgsb »

jhoechtl wrote: post #36
blurbleblurble wrote: post #2

The bookmark workflow is an impressive demonstration that browsers have a lot of room for improvement in their bookmarking tools. I'm hoping (and optimistic) that the distributed web brings with it some epiphanies about how to do better local knowledge management!

Firefox sync with tags and knowing how to use the FF search bar to filter tags comes close for me

I didn't know we could search in the bookmarks from the address bar directly. It is indeed a nice feature. Here is the documentation for reference https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...

More specifically in the section Changing results on the fly

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#87

Post by tkainrad »

AJRF wrote: post #85
tkainrad wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, you have a point. I am indeed a little bit worried. Some things that ease my mind: Notion's export and backup features are quite good. You can export everything in various formats, markdown being the most relevant for me. This only becomes messy with complex databases that use formulas and are related to each other. You would not have these with local solutions in the first place. Notion is already profita…

Have you actually done an export of your Notion workspace? I looked at their options before using Notion and was happy they had a full export available - but then I actually went ahead and used it because they are putting zero focus into improving the performance of the apps - and the export format is a horrific mess! They split out code blocks from your notes in separate notes, the filenames are a mess and images ar…

I have not yet done a complete export of my workspace. I do however often export specific databases, notes, etc.

My post describes how I use it to draft my blog posts, where I also use the Markdown export feature. The code blocks are fine and within the same file, so I am not sure what you mean there.

Images are not ideal, but I don't know how it could be done much better. Everything is exported into a .zip and the images are also there.

Admittedly, my long term hope for a reliable and automated way of backing up everything relies on the API. Their promise that it will be released soon is a little awkward by now, but I am sure that it will come eventually. I don't think its true that it is already a year since they first said it would be here soon.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#88

Post by karlicoss »

AJRF wrote: post #85
tkainrad wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, you have a point. I am indeed a little bit worried. Some things that ease my mind: Notion's export and backup features are quite good. You can export everything in various formats, markdown being the most relevant for me. This only becomes messy with complex databases that use formulas and are related to each other. You would not have these with local solutions in the first place. Notion is already profita…

Have you actually done an export of your Notion workspace? I looked at their options before using Notion and was happy they had a full export available - but then I actually went ahead and used it because they are putting zero focus into improving the performance of the apps - and the export format is a horrific mess! They split out code blocks from your notes in separate notes, the filenames are a mess and images ar…

Never used notion, but personally I'd prefer a machine readable and raw export, at least you can assemble your stuff back in any way you prefer. More annoying when you have to scrape data you're interested in from htmls.

But yeah, lack of API is a major problem, and main reason I haven't even considered trying it yet.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#89

Post by swuecho »

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?

you can use tiddywiki with a node backend.

https://github.com/djmaze/tiddlywiki-docker

if you want to host on arm device, https://github.com/djmaze/tiddlywiki-docker/issues/15

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#90

Post by swuecho »

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 run it in docker.

https://github.com/djmaze/tiddlywiki-docker

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