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Managing my personal knowledge base

tkainrad.dev

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Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#111

Post by mrspuratic »

nickjj wrote: post #97

Does anyone else use plain text notes for everything? I've tried to optimize things so that while working, I can get things jotted down with close to zero resistance. If the barrier of entry is too high then I don't bother doing it. That means often being able to spawn a new terminal, write a command and be done with it. Or to be able to pipe something from my clipboard into an auto-dated file. I ended up putting tog…

Yep, zero resistance: plaintext, with context, metadata, keywords, minimal formatting, grep and a few scripts. The most important thing to remember is that I don't remember everything, so write it down, and use sensible filenames/hierarchy/tags/metadata so it can be found easily.

The less temptation to play with CSS, formatting and markup the better. One day it'll all go in a self-contained minimal wiki. Maybe.

On my android phone I use an ancient app called "unote" (installed from an .apk which I keep, it's long since disappeared from Play). Simple, hierarchical plaintext notes, kept in a local sqlite file. Sadly no search, but that just means I have to be disciplined about what, where and pruning.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#112

Post by Terretta »

Pamar wrote: post #61
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 i…

Maybe https://www.stclairsoft.com/HistoryHound/index.html or https://historio.us

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#113

Post by BLKNSLVR »

mettamage wrote: post #15
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 use tiddlywiki with noteself on a self-hosted server.

I've been doing the same for a couple of months now, and I love it. Can access it from various devices through the browser and it syncs well.

Big thumbs up from me so far.

The hardest part was setting up a CouchDB instance for the backend, but I found some instructions and fiddled with it until it worked.

Link: https://noteself.github.io/

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#114

Post by loriverkutya »

dope9967 wrote: post #98

Google Keep is pretty awesome for notes. Has a good search, supports tagging, can pin, manually order notes, create calendar reminders from them, attach images, colors. Supports plain text notes and checklists. Also, there's not only a web app but desktop and phone ones too.

And it’s all gone, when they shut it down.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#115

Post by BLKNSLVR »

vinu76jsr wrote: post #50
mettamage wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use tiddlywiki with noteself on a self-hosted server.

how do you secure it, is it a long obfuscated URL?

My setup requires a username and password to be entered, which I think is the intended authentication method, since it uses a database at the backend.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#116

Post by chrisweekly »

koevet wrote: post #53
chrisweekly wrote: post #14

See also Roam ( https://roamresearch.com )

Just tried to sign-up on Roam. The sign-up page redirects to some tracking site ( https://trackcmp.net/redir?actid=66602... ), which is blocked by my pi-hole. Not looking good.

Bummer. I signed up a few weeks ago (free), and have been enjoying it tremendously. To the point where I'm glad they'll take my money bc it's more than worth it, and I want to feel confident I can rely on it as a customer.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#117

Post by harha »

rusticpenn wrote: post #107
harha wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At that point Emacs- org mode must be optimal for the use case

I'm not sure if learning a new system is worth it, given the simplicity of markdown files - do you have any good resources?

My goal for now is to have a simple way to record (the files) and manage (the folders) notes, collaborate (I currently use gitlab repositories) and potentially use them later, e.g. by copying relevant parts to make posts, documentation etc, or by writing a script that finds relationships based on the content (something I've been thinking about for links I save in Safari or Firefox too - a script that scrapes the pages and builds a tree to organize links automatically).

Maybe a tool that could navigate the files, extract headlines and content to figure out relationships out of the files would be ideal to help me compose new documents and posts.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#118

Post by mrspuratic »

lcampbell wrote: post #56
fit2rule wrote: post #55

Don't bookmark. Instead: Print to PDF. I have every interesting article or web reference I've ever read since 1997, sitting in a PDF file alongside tens of thousands of others. It is so convenient to be able to "ls -l | grep subject" and find all the pages related to that subject, and then to mine the data out of the PDF's for further reference. Or, I just open the PDF and gain the knowledge again. This works very we…

I've always thought of PDF as an opaque format. How do you search and/or browse your collection? Does the subject show up in grep [e: without being diligent with filenames]?

I (*nix user) use a script that basically does:

    pdftotext -layout -eol unix -nopgbrk  $PDF | egrep ...
Many PDFs have compressed content streams, plain text utilities only see metadata in that case. Cached, compressed text-only output is usually tiny, and can be zgrep-ed.

pdfinfo shows document metadata (title, subject, keywords and more), but it's quite uncommon for these to be useful (Adobe and LᴬTᴇX-sourced PDFs tend to have this data).

Both come with xpdf.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#119

Post by thanatropism »

nickjj wrote: post #97

Does anyone else use plain text notes for everything? I've tried to optimize things so that while working, I can get things jotted down with close to zero resistance. If the barrier of entry is too high then I don't bother doing it. That means often being able to spawn a new terminal, write a command and be done with it. Or to be able to pipe something from my clipboard into an auto-dated file. I ended up putting tog…

I'm experimenting with a single 500K+ line-long flat text file for EVERYTHING, from dream journalling to work email drafts to blog posts etc. -- I've even copied math from my home whiteboard in latex -- screw rendering, I'll transcribe them back when I need them.

At one point I was trying to do a Luhmann's Zettelkasten with one note per txt file, internal linking, etc. I concatenated every piece of txt content I had. It's much simpler.

I have no system anymore. I try to create internal "hashtags" that are ctrl-F searchable. The goal is having something that's always open and at hand. I got plugins for autosaving when the window loses focus, autoloading when changed in disk and it syncs to Dropbox.

I cobbled together in Notepad++ (which has a GUI for this) a small syntax coloring definition that sort of matches my spontaneous habits from old salvaged text. I intend to let this evolve too. E.g. I'm using {braces} to have a little collapse button that hides pieces of text.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#120

Post by baylessj »

Glad to see a shoutout to Workona here, I've really appreciated the ability to save bookmarks in workspaces and better separate and compartmentalize my browsing by project.

Their support team is great too, had an issue with an update using Brave recently and they were very helpful with fixing the error.

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