Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?
In the last few years I have collected a large amount of ebooks, papers, articles, movies, pictures, etc. (all digital).
I am at a point where I would like to organize these items into a cohesive, searchable and maintainable system. I have looked at various methods (e.g. Niklas Luhmanns "Zettelkasten", Zotero, Org-Mode) and I am not satisfied yet. Any tips?
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadI do organize my knowledge since years (http://metamn.io/beat, http://metamn.io/pulse, http://metamn.io/gust) and now I’ve collected these experiences into a Wordpress theme.
Still under development / test phase ... you are welcome to try it out.
devonthink if you want a personal knowledge database with good searching
I'm not affiliated in any ways but his ideas a really well thought out and apparently thoroughly tested with clients.
Personally I store raw thoughts and ideas in Keep, then transfer them daily or weekly to OneNote. Every so often I review the notes.
I have notes from anything important I've ever learned, ranging from technology stacks to economics to capital markets to psychology or personal well-being. I now never worry about losing thoughts or not seeing "the big picture" - it's a picture (note really) that I've saved over years now. And ever so gradually, I just build on that knowledge base, which I see as an extension of my own brain.
Edit: and if you don't use the cloud, _make sure you back up every few weeks_. It takes 5 minutes and you will really regret losing part of your brain if you break your laptop.
I find that any kind of knowledge search system eventually gets saturated and requires increasingly more time to scroll through partial hits to find what was asked. Our brains work the fastest in associative mode, it'd be nice to have some kind of associative storage (other than tags) that is personally biased/customized.
Reviewing the kept info is one way to refersh these associations in our organic minds.
But it'd be cool to ask your 'MindAssistant' to retrieve you the whole context of your recent or old idea, complete with your thought pathways: 'Hey, Mind, please remind me what was I thinking about the shapes of the clouds in the sky', '-Here's your Mindmap, thought-journey, and most important insights, Sir. At the conclusion of these thoughts, you read the following articles via HN...'
http://zim-wiki.org/index.html
And I use Gingkoapp to organize my thoughts.
Downloaded data: Folders PDF, Video, TV. Own Generated data: Photos in a YEAR/MONTH Labels Textual: In Dropbox, Excel, Text, Word
All data on master Hard Disk, two more copies.
A lot of people think of GDrive as pure storage but unsurprisingly Google search within drive is pretty good at finding stuff. Although when you know it's there and search fails, it's frustrating as hell.
Or you could write the locations of your targets on the backs of turtles.
Also, throw everything into your ~/Downloads folder and use ripgrep.
The biggest disappointment with Notion is that there is no on-prem. I would've rammed it through at work by now if there were. I've searched high and low for a comparable open-source alternative, and the best I get is outline: https://getoutline.com, but it's got a long way left to go.
One major pain point: no totally seamless mobile sync that I'm aware of. I just write things down in Google Keep and transcribe them when I'm on my laptop next.
Occasionally I have to consolidate multiple edits with ediff-files, but that's normally only after I have accidentally disabled wifi on the phone for longer periods of time.
For iOS another possible option is Editorial. There are some script addons convert orgmode to MD ↔ ORG. This is incredibly hacky though, and I'm unsure how it works.
I use beorg but it still needs a lot of work to be what I'm looking for honestly.
On top of this, if you read a fair bit of papers, check out org-ref [1]. Referencing and notetaking of papers becomes a breeze.
Finally, you can also export your notes to a bunch of different formats (e.g. html, pdf).
[1] https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref
And Google Drive for the "larger” and better organized stuff like photos, e-books, or invoices.
There were some changes in version 3 and the subsequent rebranded Keep It[1] which kept me from upgrading, but it might fit your needs.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130315081858/http://reinvented...
[1] https://reinventedsoftware.com/keepit/
I always enjoy reading this post about tag-based file organization, which feels like it would be a great foundation for this: https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organizatio...
EDIT: I'm still trying to find a good machine readable way to represent the metadata for all that information. Alas, there are only so many hours in a day. Will probably end up with tags and Pinboard.
The main downside, as someone else has mentioned here with org-mode, is the lack of a good mobile editor. This is something I’ve wanted to find time to fix for years but still haven’t had a chance.
I sync to a server with vim and vimwiki installed and on my phone I just mosh[0] in. I don't generally do extensive editing on the go, though. Did the solution you have in mind include a specialized editor for touchscreens?
[0]: https://mosh.org/