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Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?
31–40 of 76 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?
#32I built my own solution for this that I've discussed and shared on HN before[1].
For me, keeping track of this sort of stuff was important enough that I decided to build something that was catered specifically to my wants and needs.
[1]: Previous discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33978500
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?
#33A small tip I use -> I ask myself : can I find it later using a keyword ? if yes, I pass. I may sometimes append these keywords (and related ones) to my notes (if they are specific/new) See, the problem is the keywords : the way we search for it later will sometimes not lead (directly anyway) to the original keywords/results. So, The day we will have good enough NLP search for history/bookmarks/notes, this problem wi…
> can I find it later using a keyword ? if yes, I pass.
I got disappointed by this a few times unfortunately. There are articles that I want to search for. Sometimes I even remember part of the title. Yet, the search spam comes up higher anyway and I get stupid listicles instead.
The situation was better a few years ago, but I don't believe in "I'll be able to find it by keywords" anymore.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?
#34I don't
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?
#35I can't tell if it works well yet, since I haven't been doing it for long, but I'm using public bookmarks for things that I want to save and point my instance of YaCy indexer at it. (Follow the links to +2 degree)
From basic testing it seems to work fine, but did not need to find anything critical yet. I'm tempted to add my whole browsing history to it automatically at some point, but not sure how yet. Maybe Firefox sync will help.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?
#36Store it where you find it. As favorites or stars or whatever…
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?
#37I do a lot of browsing on an iPad, and after finding the “freeform” app that showed up recently, I’m wondering if it might be a solid tool for keeping track of relevant links in the same thought thread.
It won’t help with your specific use case, “I didn’t know I was interested in finding X again until Y reminded me of it,” but once you’ve seeded a topic, using spatial memory to get back to particular links could be helpful.
Scrivener is more for writers, but has some good (and more proven) ways to organize references.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?
#38I simply don’t and stopped caring about the deluge.
Give “4000 weeks” a read.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?
#39For the majority of your time only look at content that fills gaps in your knowledge tree that is beneficial for you. You will retain this information naturally since it will be supported by previous knowledge and reinforced with future content
For fun (like 10% of your time) go on HN and other aggregators. Try to retroactively fit that knowledge into your knowledge tree, otherwise expect that content to be lost
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of all the content you encounter?
#40After trying and failing for various years to find the perfect system, I've since landed on the most dead-simple system possible: aggressively organizing my browser's bookmarks. As one might assume, it's a few general categories progressively broken down into more and more specific folders. For instance: tech/programming/command line/editors/neovim/plugins.
The one "magic" thing I've figured out is to put "_to check out" folders in various places. So, in the above example .../plugins/_to check out is for neovim plugins to...well, check out, but then .../editors_to check out is for new command line editors. Not that there are many of those, but you get the idea.
The other "magic" thing to make this actually work is to, rather than immediately going to HN or Reddit or whatever, instead I pick whatever category tickles my fancy at the moment and then find something in the _to check out folder.
I recently had the idea to write a little app that grabs a few random bookmarks from the various _to check out folders and serve them to me in the morning. I think that'll tie the whole together nicely.