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Evolving my note-taking processes

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Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#31

Post by samsquire »

abrax3141 wrote: post #29
samsquire wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am adding to my journal every day. If someone checks my journal on Monday, unless they scroll to the bottom to check for new journal entries on Tuesday, they shall miss the journal entries I added Tuesday. (Unless they come back but I feel I have one chance to gain a regular reader) I submit to HN when I reach a new batch of 100-300 entries. I don't want people to not see the new entries. I only tweak or add to old…

Hunh??? (Also, why would anyone want to read anyone else’s personal journal, I mean, I guess if you were Donald Trump it might be “interesting”. But if there were more than, like, three of these that I followed, I’d be reading personal journals more than doing anything else. I barely have time to follow podcasts that drop once a month, much less the random musings of random hackers.)

I see my journal of ideas as a blog. I just happen to use GitHub and it is formatted as a journal.

I am always looking for high quality things to read. So I'm interested in other people's blogs such as Joel on Software or Jeff Atwood or Joe Duffy.

If you don't find it interesting then you are not the intended audience.

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#32

Post by abrax3141 »

I find all online note taking to be useless because you can’t efficiently and effectively draw on any existing platform with anything like the convenience of p&p. Also, why aren’t you all just using gDocs, like everyone else? Self hosting your personal notes seems like you’re putting your precious brain dumps one drive failure away from disaster.

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#33

Post by gofreddygo »

reactspa wrote: post #10

Markdown question: I want to take create a chronological journal where I track tutorials I've done (and how well, etc), but I want to add some sort of a tag wherever I feel like so that with a click I can find all my entries related to (say) React, or R (statistics), and so on. If you're reading this, and have had luck with such a tagging mechanism, please share your solution. FOSS only, of course.

This simple idea changed my life:

    yyyymmdd-topic-title
I derived mine directly from a comment [1] on a writer (as in book authors) oriented forum. That one comment is worth a full blown website on its own.

I don't need tags. Willing to come across patronizing and say you don't either (not for personal knowledge management). Pretty soon you need to sort tags, find tags, cluster related tags, create tags of tags and other goofy gunk (see tiddlywiki to scratch this itch)

I keep things organized under 10 topics (so far used just 7). All plain text files. At the moment it lives in simplenote [2] (thats how I found the link above as a demonstration of its utility). I found notational velocity [3] and its alter ego NValt [4] useful when I had a Mac. Did not look for alternatives on windows. I just email myself these days. Look in my comment history for some tip around how I use that.

All of this is good for digital stuff. But for the deep, analog stuff that really matters, nothing, nothing beats the utility of taking notes in a 1 subject college notebook with a Pilot G2 ( i use a .38). I use the right side only (trade off for using cheap books). First page is the index. Each page numbered. I just make clusters of related words on each page. The main topic is circled to draw attention (4-5 per page). Anything related to it gets words around it. Details, references, long thoughts, go on the backside. Stacks well. I take pictures of good stuff. Don't fret if I lose any books (not lost any permanently till now). Do explore this route and see where that leads you. (hey a collge notebook is $00.75 in staples last I checked. What have you got to lose ?)

[1]: https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/large-scale-info-mana...

[2]: https://app.simplenote.com/

[3]: https://notational.net/

[4]: https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#34

Post by nextos »

sureglymop wrote: post #6

What I want in a personal note taking system is something where I can link anything. Anything is just a generic object that can be linked to and worked with. Like a mix between Logseq and Nextcloud, where I can still use CalDav and CardDav but I can link to tasks and calendar events and contacts from my notes. And i can link to a certain pdf page right from my notes.. or even a certain page of a word document. Anythi…

Org (org-mode) supports many link types, and you can easily define more: https://orgmode.org/manual/External-Links.html

It's a shame the Ruby renderer used by GitHub and GitLab doesn't understand them. I've been intending to patch it.

In the meantime, one can always define a CI task that uses Emacs to export to HTML.

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#35

Post by triyambakam »

abrax3141 wrote: post #32

I find all online note taking to be useless because you can’t efficiently and effectively draw on any existing platform with anything like the convenience of p&p. Also, why aren’t you all just using gDocs, like everyone else? Self hosting your personal notes seems like you’re putting your precious brain dumps one drive failure away from disaster.

> putting your precious brain dumps one drive failure away from disaster.

The likelihood of Google locking you out of your account seems higher than your own drive failing.

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#36

Post by Test0129 »

I prefer pen and paper for most things. For that I'd recommend the supernote [1] with the utmost confidence. It has single-handedly changed my life. My biggest issue was I wanted to go digital (because paper sucks to handle) but my experience with the usual suspects in the tablet market left a lot to be desired. I didn't really need all the bells and whistles. Just a paper replacement. I didn't want to use org mode or anything because after trying these things the retention I got out of it wasn't great.

I've been using it for months for basically everything from project ideas to journaling and I've been impressed.

[1] https://supernote.com/

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#37

Post by abrax3141 »

triyambakam wrote: post #35
abrax3141 wrote: post #32

I find all online note taking to be useless because you can’t efficiently and effectively draw on any existing platform with anything like the convenience of p&p. Also, why aren’t you all just using gDocs, like everyone else? Self hosting your personal notes seems like you’re putting your precious brain dumps one drive failure away from disaster.

> putting your precious brain dumps one drive failure away from disaster. The likelihood of Google locking you out of your account seems higher than your own drive failing.

Really? Why would google lock you out of your account unless you’re not who you claim to be? I mean, maybe temporarily, but that’s just more evidence of them being super secure.

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#39

Post by abrax3141 »

samsquire wrote: post #31
abrax3141 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hunh??? (Also, why would anyone want to read anyone else’s personal journal, I mean, I guess if you were Donald Trump it might be “interesting”. But if there were more than, like, three of these that I followed, I’d be reading personal journals more than doing anything else. I barely have time to follow podcasts that drop once a month, much less the random musings of random hackers.)

I see my journal of ideas as a blog. I just happen to use GitHub and it is formatted as a journal. I am always looking for high quality things to read. So I'm interested in other people's blogs such as Joel on Software or Jeff Atwood or Joe Duffy. If you don't find it interesting then you are not the intended audience.

Oh. I see. Yes, framing this as using GitHub as a (micro)blogging platform makes it make much more sense (at least to me).

Re: Evolving my note-taking processes

#40

Post by ILMostro7 »

samsquire wrote: post #2

I journal computer and software ideas as markdown files out in the open on GitHub. When I get to 100-300 entries I move onto a new repository. https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas2 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas3 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas4 https://GitHub.com/samsquire/startups I create a new markdown heading for each entry and write. It's searchable and the data is easy t…

Do you get paid every time the word "idea" appears on the page?

Interesting process, though.

thanks

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