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Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

eleanorkonik.com

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Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#71

Post by renewiltord »

EleanorKonik wrote: post #24
bacro wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it was so hot, that the database melted.

I'm hosted on Digital Ocean, and the irony is, I'm literally mid-migration to Ghost from Wordpress — if this had happened a week later this wouldn't have happened. I'm trying to figure out how to upgrade the droplet but being honest, my husband is the one who set all this up for me, so it's going to take me a minute to figure out how to add more bandwidth or whatever.

It's an old problem. You just need WP-Cache or WP-SuperCache or successor plugins. i.e. not your fault, this happens to everyone who runs WP.

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#72

Post by tkot »

I have settled on putting tags (bunch of words I associate with given subject separated by underscores) in names of files/directories and using FSearch (https://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch) to search for the tags in names/paths.

It's simple, it's portable, it's good enough. You could in theory improve it by having multiple views of the same data (let's say you want to save some notes about "Naturalis Historia" - should you put it under "ancient Rome" directory or under"biology"?) for example by using hardlinks but I don't know if there is a way to create a backup on another filesystem that will keep hardlinks as hardlinks (DAR seems promising http://dar.linux.free.fr/doc/Features.html but I have yet to try it).

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#73

Post by mro_name »

bityard wrote: post #67

I keep my personal notes in an app that I wrote which is backed by SQLite. It resembles a wiki. First, I tried tags. This seemed like a good idea and was a lot of fun at first, but eventually I got _really_ tired of having to curate tags for all of my notes and boy there were a lot of them! It's not something you can just do once either, because every time you update a note you have to remember to change the list of…

exactly the same sold me on spotlight search on macos. Have to sign "for all of their other faults got one thing extremely right" as well, sigh.

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#74

Post by 24thofjan »

throwoutway wrote: post #34
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. They both have a place. I use Zotero to keep track of my references and also just interesting things I find. It uses folders and tags. Fantastic!

Could you describe your Zotero folder & tag strategy? I don’t know where to start with this and it’s a hot mess

Here you can see uses of folders and tags. It's from an academic context but you'll get the idea. https://youtu.be/efLOqgS4jzA

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#76

Post by mro_name »

fouc wrote: post #64

It should be possible to mimic tags with folders & clever scripting that moves files around according to their "tags". Imagine a command like: tagmv file1 file2 directory1 directory2 -t tag1 tag2 tag3 where it moves the files/directories to something like ~/t/tag1#/tag2#/tag3#/ Or instead of using "#" could use some other special/rare character/unicode to indicate that it is a "tag-directory". The hierarchy of the ta…

There's a talk about such https://karl-voit.at/managing-digital-photographs/, there's a video.

Karl seems to have a fancy TUI, I made me a cmdline helper https://codeberg.org/mro/Tagger.

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#77

Post by joe8756438 »

I think a casual relationship to tags and folders together is the way. I built a system that allows both [0]. And using them together has some advantages. It's important that nothing of type A could ever be of type B. This is useful managing client work, and other things like transactional data. Folders handle this scenario. OTOH, a lot of research material for one bucket might be related to another, for me that's usually programming related articles etc. I want to review all that stuff together -- a tag handles that.

In other words, folders create boundaries between information, and tags connect across those boundaries.

[0]. https://www.tatatap.com

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#78

Post by mro_name »

politician wrote: post #65
ASalazarMX wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folders are simple, even if tags can imitate them, they can't replace their structure. Tags are a good fit for items that naturally fall into several categories, like music or books, but not for general file systems.

And yet, folders are tags.

just veeery shy ones.

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#79

Post by onion2k »

bityard wrote: post #67

I keep my personal notes in an app that I wrote which is backed by SQLite. It resembles a wiki. First, I tried tags. This seemed like a good idea and was a lot of fun at first, but eventually I got _really_ tired of having to curate tags for all of my notes and boy there were a lot of them! It's not something you can just do once either, because every time you update a note you have to remember to change the list of…

Search works brilliantly for your own notes because you know what you're looking for. You wrote the notes. It fails for problems that you can't describe well though, especially if you don't know the technical jargon to search for. Directories and tags can work for that problem because you can easily see relationships like a hierarchy of folders, or what other tags a tagged item has. Tags and folders also act as a prompt to classify and organise things, which occasionaly leads to discovering how things are connected.

"How to find stuff" is a space with many solutions to similar looking but subtly different problems.

Re: Yet another hot take on “folders versus tags”

#80

Post by culi »

pphysch wrote: post #60

Trees/hierarchies ("folders") are for organization, unconstrained graphs/networks ("tags") are for ontologies. Crossing these streams leads to a lot of trouble. When flexible graphs/networks are abused for organizational purposes, you get circular dependencies, spaghetti code, and general dysfunction. Organizations (code or people) need to be easy to navigate. When rigid hierarchies are abused for classification purp…

You could hypothetically collapse the two though. You can have tags and could use those to automatically generate efficient organization structures.

For example, say you have the following datums with the following tags

  apple:     plant, Rosaceae, tree, fruit
  peach:     plant, Rosaceae, tree, fruit
  rose:      plant, Rosaceae, shrub, flower
  dandelion: plant, Asteraceae, herb, flower
  carrot:    plant, Apiaceae, herb, root
  pig:       animal, Suidae
You can then try to generate a folder structures that optimizes certain parameters like keeping the average number of children to not too far away from ~6 and/or minimizing the depth of the repo structure or whatever. Depending on how you wanna optimize it, you could end up with a number of structures such as:

  root
  - plant
    - tree
      - apple
      - peach
    - herb
      - dandelion
      - carrot
    - rose
  - animals
    - pig
or

  root
  - Rosaceae
    - apple
    - peach
    - rose
  - animal
    - pig
  - other
    - dandelion
    - carrot
You can use your imagination to think of better structures or optimization problems, but you get the basic point. We can have tags be our primary classification method and have the organizational structure be an outcome of that.
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