121–130 of 181 posts
After the past 5 years or so of experiencing the supposed best "folderless" computing has to offer on iOS and ideologically similar platforms. I've gained huge respect for how beautiful the concept of the folder is.
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.
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…
Let's say you have notes about SQLite. If you don't put "SQLite" in the note, how will you find them?
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…
I feel like you must be implicitly tagging your notes. Let's say you have notes about SQLite. If you don't put "SQLite" in the note, how will you find them?
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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 .
I've seen that type of idea before, encoding tags within the file name. But as someone that lives in the terminal, I'm not a huge fan of cluttering up and making the file names so long.
But if you don't use filenames you have to store this tagging information externally, which has to stay in sync with file locations and ideally not be reliant on one specific program. There's folders + symlinks but I imagine that might be complicated to manage as well.
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I feel like you must be implicitly tagging your notes. Let's say you have notes about SQLite. If you don't put "SQLite" in the note, how will you find them?
select * from notes where upper(text) like '%SQLITE%' :P
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…
An interesting hybrid approach I've experimented with in the past is to use tags while ensuring that the tags themselves are purely hierarchical. (Is there a name for this scheme?)
"expert/american" and "american/expert" couldn't have duplicate content so you take your tag system and overlay hierarchies.
Anything that wasn't manually set was auto hierarchied based on highest traffic volume.
I also prevented tags from showing up on the same tag chain, so any given keyword could only appear once. That prevented infinite recursion.
Moving away from hierarchy also made interesting permutations easier to generate.
Since any metadata can become a tag, price or price range ($100hr – $300hr) is easy to generate and "enhance" American/Experts/Between$100and$300anhour.
It worked really well, allowed us to manually enforce high traffic hierarchies/phrases while still auto-generating intelligent canonical links for the rest of the site.
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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
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An interesting hybrid approach I've experimented with in the past is to use tags while ensuring that the tags themselves are purely hierarchical. (Is there a name for this scheme?)
I'm having troubles visualising what you mean, without it becoming "just folders". Can you elaborate?
python, databases, SQL, SQLite, $date, FromHN, beautiful_site (I liked the look of this blog)
or in proposed system
/IT/Databases/SQL/Sqlite /IT/Python/libraries/SQLite /IntrestingHNposts/2022/July /beutiful_site
the difference between "just folders" and the proposed system is that you could have one note in multiple folders. Which gives you more flexibility in assigning notes to its topics. But it is still more structural than tags which could easily turn into an unpenetrable list of random words.
To be fair you could also achieve it with symlinks.
Spatial metaphors is arguably the easiest shortcut to a design that makes sense to humans. Spatial reasoning is something even animals are capable of. Categories are much more abstract, and while useful, less intuitive. Which is why folders should remain, complement them with other means of navigation for sure, but hiding them away will only make things less intuitive. In the end, whatever capabilities your design ha…
Actual spatial arrangement of data (and code) is something I've wanted to try for a long time now though. It's incredibly how you can take a map that shows the entire planet, and in a few seconds zoom in to the building you're in. And in a few more seconds, zoom in to the the house you lived in when as a child in a different town. I'd like to try build a similar map of personal data and code.
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I'm really trying not to overly promote Supertag[0] in this thread (disclaimer: I am the author) , but it does exactly what you describe. 0. https://amoffat.github.io/supertag/
In my opinion, any OpenSource application should not be bashed for promoting in threads like these. What will you win? probably more work as more people try your software and raise issues (feature requests or bugs). The fact that it is Libre means that any "self promotion" will not have any monetary gain, so it is fine with me. Aaaaanyways... SuperTag looks AMAZING. I will give it a try right now and see how it works…