Managing my personal knowledge base

Managing my personal knowledge base
tkainrad.dev

I would love a system that treats all media the same as just a source of knowledge instead of being hung up on the source type i.e. is it a video, or a book mark or a pdf....

I've got quite similar system in spirit and aims, just instead of lower Notion layer, using org-mode. It ends up searchable, synchronised with all devices, available offline and with great tooling for organizing and processing information.

> While documenting my configuration, especially my command-line workflows, I identified some shortcomings

Can't agree more! I've considerably simplified so many things while writing up on my setups and publishing code -- I guess it's easier to sneak in unnecessary complexity when it's all in your head.

> They are, however, not well suited for keeping extensive bookmarks libraries.

Agree state of browser bookmarking is a bit of a shame, interfaces are restricted and bloated with non-functional features. At first I switched to Pinboard [0], but after a while I realized even that was not enough for me and wrote Grasp [1], browser extension to capture stuff directly in org-mode.

> Examples of things that should not be Chrome bookmarks

Yep, eventually reached exactly the same conclusion! I often want to add private notes, more context etc and it's just not compatible with standard bookmark solutions.

> Taking Notes

Also big fan of notetaking, I basically write down any remotely meaningful thought if I don't have time to exercise it at the moment (via org-capture). Also using same file for everything and just processing it now and then. Same for ideas for new projects, blog updates, etc -- these are just entries in org-mode.

> ..it requires some discipline. I tag and annotate new entries, that I added via the web clipper, about twice a month

Yep, doing same, going through clipped links in org-mode, tagging and putting priorities. Then I can sort by priority and start reading/refiling etc. Eventually non-important stuff just sinks down as I don't have time to process everything, but at least it's searchable.

> For example, it is quite easy to search through questions you have answered on Stack Overflow. It is also not a problem to go back to your Hacker News posts or search through projects you starred on GitHub.

I actually find that even though in theory it's easy, in practice sometimes you don't remember where exactly you need to search for something, so you end up going through 'check reddit saves', 'check HN saves', 'check twitter faves' cycles, etc. So I'm automatically converting these into org-mode and they are searchable as any other org-mode file. I describe it in more detail here [2].

P.S. Great and clean design, especially the sticky navigation on the right! I might borrow the idea :) By the way, I tried in responsive mode and it seems to disappear alltogether, perhaps you could display it on top if the screen is too small?

0. https://pinboard.in

1. https://beepb00p.xyz/grasp.html

2. https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html#other

> Ad using native bookmark sources, such as HN/Twitter/...

You are right, this is not ideal and it also happens to me that I am no longer sure where to look first. On the plus side, I do find it eventually, even if it's only the second native source I check. Atm, it seems to me that this is still better than duplicating everything in my other bookmarking layers. I will read your posts to find out more about your system, honestly don't know much about org-mode yet.

PS: Very glad to hear that! Especially, since I don't do much frontend work usually. I will think of a way to include a ToC also on small screens. Please, feel free to steal any idea you like. Then I don't have to feel as bad for looking into some of yours. I really like the pilcrows next to the headings and the dotted lines for highlighting sections on your site.

(as an alternative to grasp, because I'm on MacOS/Safari).