Ask HN: How do you manage your personal documents and E-mail (Archiving, etc)
Background:
I'm thinking about building a simple web-based document management system for personal needs as open-source solution. The current requirements:
- Custom columns (string, date, tags, numbers) - Custom libraries with different (multiple content types) - Content types (composition of columns assignable to a library) e.g. invoice, receipt, etc. - Inbox library for uncategorized documents which are not routed to the library - Forward a mail to the inbox (mail gets converted to PDF) - Converting images to PDF (receipt for example) - Maybe PDF/A conversation (OCR with tesseract)
Technology stack is: Go and Vue and probably Postgres (I will run it on my Synology using docker)
Do you have any feedback or ideas regarding: - A cool name? - Functional aspects - Technical aspects - Or further ideas?
Thanks
10 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 34.3 ms ] threadI also try not to get too "taggy" and organized. If I have something new, I just dump it into the top directory of my catalog, and eventually move it down to its own dir and do the minimal op to connect it into the catalog. No DBMS, just the file system.
When I run make on the (personal) wiki, one of the things it does is generate a sitemap, with links to everything, including the catalog part of the wiki. It also creates a catalog-specific json file, which I view directly from Firefox; the addon JsonView makes the json file fields clickable. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jsonview
Not at all advocating that you use Miki. Just an observation that its motivation is simplicity, to the point that no software was written, I just use what Linux already has, and the filesystem.
The reason for the simplicity motivation is that I've found, over the years, that the more complete a system I've used to try to "get organized," the sooner it will be abandoned. What I've devolved to is this: the "system" will be more usable, and more likely to be used, the less of that system there is.
Of course it's loads of fun to write one of these things, and that's more than enough reason to do it, so go ahead! But you might keep simplicity in mind, start from an attitude of minimalism with just enough added on, and when it's good enough, stop.
I guess all bets are off if you want an OSS project that other people are going to use and work on. In that case, "Release the Features!" :)
However:
> ... "designing the system so that the manual will be as short as possible minimizes learning effort."
The above quoted in "Expert C Programming, Deep C Secrets," by Peter Van der Linden. I used my catalog to find it. :)
I'm doing something like you with miki today, but at the end of the day I have to admit that this "easy management" is more work for me than the system I need because I'm wasting time finding a specific receipt or invoice.
I think your right with the minimalistic approach, I'm lazy and I will not use it if I have to do a lot to store a document.
I'm not quite sure if such a system is useful for the open world too but open-source it will show :P
If it's useful to you, it's worth doing.
I would pick SQLite and not PG, simpler to get it running and simpler to operate.
So that you can generate a table, links tables together and have custom hooks. (stuff like send me an email on this date.)
Then serve an html interface, so for each table you will have a form to complete.
Finally I wanted to write anything on SQL so that you can simply take the file and move so your data with you.
It is not simple but not even too difficult... It requires time.
The one I want to create is not quite your ideas but it is a super set of it...
First approach: forward mail to a mail address by the archive - Maybe hard to parse out the FW and get the original mail?
Second approach: give the archive IMAP access to connect to your mailbox and parse a folder e.g. "personal archive"
Then download the mails and attachments, convert the mail to PDF and preserve the attachments.
Any thoughts?