
Managing my personal knowledge base - tkainrad
https://tkainrad.dev/posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-base/
======
fit2rule
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 well and doesn't require an active Internet connection. Every
year I spend a few weeks up in a mountain retreat, going through the
collection and getting an idea for the variety of topics I've read about for
the year.

Its pretty neat to see, also, the changes in my interests over the years - and
as well, its pretty wild to go back to the sites after time and realise I've
got the only copy of the site - because its gone now.

I'd prefer to see more tools for manipulating PDF's become mainstream in the
future. I can't recommend highly enough the productivity I've gained by being
able to organise things this way. Its like having my own private Internet of
80,000+ pages, tailored to all the things I'm interested in ..

~~~
erikbye
> Don't bookmark. Instead: Print to PDF.

I "print" to markdown instead, even though pdfgrep sort of works I much prefer
text files.

~~~
pensatoio
That’s a great idea! How do you go about it?

~~~
erikbye
I use markdown-clipper for Firefox, it does an OK job but sometimes requires a
bit of fixing up. It does not save images, so I have to do this manually; I
use VSCode for Markdown, which has an extension for copy/pasting images to
Markdown, it inserts a link and saves the image in a subfolder.

A little friction, but if that's too much, then the article is not worth
keeping. But yes, someone with the time on their hands could contribute to
markdown-clipper, saving images locally.

------
Xunxi
I use Microsoft's Onenote. You can literally do everything in the blog as well
as audiovisual captures. All text is searchable.

This video covers some of the things you can do with it in an academic setting
but relatable.
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JQD5c8A_D2g](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JQD5c8A_D2g)

0:33 - Math equations

1:45 - Replay text

2:45 - Ink to text

3:20 - Research tools

4:39 - Immersive reader

6:01 - Web clipper browser extension

7:12 - Save emails to OneNote

NB: [https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/microsoft-365/blog/2015/11/1...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/microsoft-365/blog/2015/11/12/onenote-in-november-embed-video-record-audio-
insert-files-and-more/)

~~~
mkl
I disagree completely. I wouldn't trust anything important to OneNote, and
it's hard to get things out of it again, too. Your notes are basically locked
in. You can sort of print to PDF, but it uses different pagination to the
original PDFs you annotate! PDFs are inserted as bitmap images instead of
vector format, and text is only sometimes searchable.

OneNote has a really scary number of obvious bugs, with pen input especially.
Writing disappears immediately or jumps left and right, the document randomly
stops updating the screen, the program gets stuck in a high-CPU loop making
huge input lag and needs restarting, selecting writing doesn't select what you
draw around but a smaller area inside that, etc. It's incredibly frustrating
and difficult compared to the Android pen-based notes app I use, Squid (which
has a much narrower focus, but is much better at it).

~~~
larntz
My biggest issue with onenote is that you can no longer use local notebooks
with the new versions. I'm stuck on onenote 2016 or all my local notebooks
become read only.

One drive is blocked at work so onenote is effectively useless to me now.

For now, I've started moving my notes to a static site using hugo. It's a bit
less convenient, but until I settle on a better permanent solution at least I
have text files I can move around and manipulated in bulk if needed.

~~~
jgalt212
seriously.

it blows my mind that there is no good migration strategy for pc base OneNote
databases to cloud based ones.

------
travolter
Why would you store all of this valuable information in a proprietary tool?
What happens when notion shuts down, jacks up prices, makes feature changes
you don't like, etc etc? Make some attempt to migrate all this data? It's
gonna be hard to do this in an automated way, if they even have an (export)
api for this. I'm using (vim)wiki/gollum and I feel much safer about my data.

~~~
tkainrad
Obviously, you have a point. I am indeed a little bit worried.

Some things that ease my mind:

Notion's export and backup features are quite good. You can export everything
in various formats, markdown being the most relevant for me. This only becomes
messy with complex databases that use formulas and are related to each other.
You would not have these with local solutions in the first place.

Notion is already profitable and growing rapidly, I do not see them shutting
down in the foreseeable future. However, the other concerns are relevant.

The API is supposed to be released soon. I intend to either build a backup
workflow myself or use other tools that will get developed then.

~~~
AJRF
Have you actually done an export of your Notion workspace?

I looked at their options before using Notion and was happy they had a full
export available - but then I actually went ahead and used it because they are
putting zero focus into improving the performance of the apps - and the export
format is a horrific mess!

They split out code blocks from your notes in separate notes, the filenames
are a mess and images aren't saved inline (as they could be with something
like base64).

For workspaces of any reasonable size, you're going to be doing a lot of work
to make the export actually useful outside the context of Notion - which
should be obvious given how they treat things as blocks (and all the
abstractions that come with that make it into their underlying data
structures)

They've also been saying the "API is coming soon" for about a year now.

~~~
karlicoss
Never used notion, but personally I'd prefer a machine readable and raw
export, at least you can assemble your stuff back in any way you prefer. More
annoying when you have to scrape data you're interested in from htmls.

But yeah, lack of API is a major problem, and main reason I haven't even
considered trying it yet.

~~~
tkainrad
I think Markdown does qualify as machine-readable. There are very good
libraries to do all kinds of things with it.

 _Edit: I guess you meant human-readable as opposed to things like base64, and
not as a critique against Markdown._

By now, there are several unofficial APIs at least, for read-access they are
quite good apparently, did not yet use one myself though. E.g.
[https://github.com/kjk/notionapi](https://github.com/kjk/notionapi)

------
nickjj
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 together this ~15 line Bash script which seems to do the
trick: [https://github.com/nickjj/notes](https://github.com/nickjj/notes)

I've been using plain text notes since 2001, although I only recently created
this script. So far so good.

~~~
thanatropism
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.

~~~
josephernest
I use the same method for years: big single .txt file, with hashtags that are
CTRL+F searchable, exactly the same!

Among all the organization/notetaking methods I've tried, this is really the
best. No fancy app in the browser, but really effective and fast.

I've written a small article about it here:

[https://illdoitlater.xyz/t/plaintext](https://illdoitlater.xyz/t/plaintext)

~~~
qot
> Cons: no sync with a mobile device

How do you access your notes on your phone? How do you edit?

~~~
kuzimoto
What about using syncthing? There are decent text editors for mobile.

------
w_t_payne
I've got a hybrid system.

Academic papers, standards documents, white papers etc... get downloaded as
PDF and renamed according to a (human-readable) standard scheme that I use
(year, title, [author(s)], [paper-type]), and stored in a 'meaningful'
filesystem hierarchy. Podcasts and some videos are also stored in the same
hierarchy.

Documentation for the software libraries and APIs that I use is downloaded
from readthedocs (where possible) and stored in a parallel system that takes
account of versioning. (So I can concurrently store differently versioned
copies of the documentation for a single library).

I have a simple python script that iterates through my directory hierarchy and
produces a sqlite database and a couple of xlsx files with a row-per document
(one spreadsheet for reporting document-management metadata and another that
allows me to assign labels and write precis notes). The script also extracts
the content of the PDFs as plain-text and feeds some NLP tools that I'm
playing with.

I use the spreadsheets to keep notes on the files, and the act of manually
renaming and sorting the PDFs into the 'right' place in the hierarchy helps me
to understand what's in them and remember what I've got. (I'm constantly
reorganising the hierarchy as my understanding develops and evolves. My python
script keeps everything -- notes and documents and other metadata - in sync).

So far this has scaled OK to around 26,000 PDFs.

~~~
HSO
Sounds good. How do you handle cases where the same document fits multiple
categories (ie belongs in multiple locations of your hierarchy at once)?

Ps. Another question: can you tell which nlp libs are best for this purpose in
your experience (and how do you eventually search the generated index?)

~~~
w_t_payne
I can have multiple copies of the same document in the system. My notes are
associated with documents via md5 hash, so it'll link them with all copies
that are present. At some point I'll get the script to automatically hardlink
or symlink duplicates. To be honest though, trying to decide which location
_best_ fits a document is quite a good way to engage with the document content
-- so even though decisions are often suboptimal, it isn't really the final
hierarchy which is the product here, it's what goes on in my brain during the
process of trying to organize the papers. As far as the NLP libs question is
concerned -- so far this is just an excuse for me to play with SpaCy .... I'm
still at quite an early stage and haven't made much progress (my background is
more machine vision than NLP - which I haven't touched since I was an
undergrad 20 years ago).

~~~
HSO
Very interesting, thanks for your answer. good point too abt using the
rigidity as a forcing function for yourself.

I have quite a big system myself, using bibdesk as my interface to filesystem,
and searchability would be very nice indeed. Atm i only use default system
tools like spotlight (macos) or mdfind. More custom nlp solution, your post
inspires me to think more harder abt that.

------
bnj
I’d like to look into the features of notion more, but I can’t help but wonder
why it isn’t more common to see people using a local SQLite database, or any
other self hosted database, to serve as a personal knowledge base management
system. A lot of the paid solutions I’ve seen seem to bend over backwards to
offer a limited subset of the features that are trivially available in an
actual database.

Has anyone tried out using a personal database like this?

~~~
yen223
I have a postgres instance running somewhere that has a history of stuff that
I've recorded.

The reason why one might choose not to do this is that a) it takes a bit of
work to get syncing across devices, and b) it takes a bit of work to get
markdown, images, search, videos etc working.

~~~
nsomaru
Any chance you could share your process?

------
romwell
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/](https://tiddlywiki.com/)

~~~
whalesalad
How do you recommend running it? The install guide lists a half-dozen
different possibilities including PHP, Node, Ruby which all look to be vastly
different solutions.

~~~
hydrox24
You just download the HTML file and open it to 'run' it. Then, once you've
made changes, use your browsers "save as" feature to save a copy. Everything
is in browser.

Other options do things like public hosting.

Personally, I just use the HTML file with the Timimi Firefox plugin installed
for autosaving the current file.

~~~
shakna
> use your browsers "save as" feature to save a copy

> Don't attempt to use the browser File/Save menu option to save changes (it
> doesn't work)

It looks like TiddlyWiki doesn't recommend that exact method anymore.

~~~
elbear
I use TiddlyDesktop and open with it the HTML file that I downloaded from the
site. The desktop app takes care of saving the file when you finished editing
a post and save it.

------
antjanus
I'm a huge fan of Org-mode and so far it's been the most persistent way to
keep track of my knowledge base.

I have a single file called "engineering-notebook" and I store pretty much
everything in it:

\- bookmarks to resources

\- personal notes

\- personal tutorials/step-by-steps

\- cheatsheets

It works fantastically for me

~~~
sandinmyjoints
It’s all I need, I have tens of thousands of lines of notes at this point, can
search them (text, regexes, tags, whatever) essentially instantly, can export
to html or slides or pdf or $format, will never go down or close down or
disappear behind a paywall, it’s perfect

~~~
inakarmacoma
Accessible mostly everywhere, but really exploring, manipulating content
across mobile devices and operating systems gets pretty frustrating. Love it
in theory, but DynaList is just so simple to use anywhere without a second
thought.

~~~
benhurmarcel
Dynalist hits the right spot for me to manage my current work (tasks, quick
notes…). Simple but flexible, extra features not overwhelming you if you don't
need them. But their mobile app isn't great.

------
The_Colonel
I was jumping from one note taking app to another before realizing I have to
develop my own to be fully satisfied:
[https://github.com/zadam/trilium](https://github.com/zadam/trilium)

~~~
kamarg
This looks amazing. Any thoughts on what it would take to turn it into a
minimally usable PWA so that I could carry things I consider important with me
even in offline mode?

~~~
The_Colonel
No PWA, but there's electron desktop build which can work fully online (and
then sync).

------
oedmarap
For this I use Notable[0] with its data directory located in a GitLab repo. A
combination of Markdown and Git with Notable's impressive UI. You can also use
any cloud drive, Cryptomator vault, etc. for the storage backend.

Notable's categories (tags) for me include things like manpage snippets, code
snippets, workspaces/scratchpads, thoughts, etc.

Of note, a lot of the things in my head that I need to jot down on my mobile,
even at length, are usually stored in Simplenote[1] then transferred to
Notable if they're important enough, via Simplenote's desktop app.

[0] [https://notable.md](https://notable.md) [1]
[https://simplenote.com](https://simplenote.com)

------
nickthemagicman
What I would love is a full personal CMS type system, where I can have a
subject like "cybersecurity" or "cooking" and I can add bookmarks, notes,
pdfs, and they're all treated equally and as first class objects in the
system.

I would love a system that treats all media the same as just a source of
knowledge instead of being hung up on the source type i.e. is it a video, or a
book mark or a pdf....

~~~
1kGarand
I have been using a text file (actually an org mode file) since 2009. Before
that I used a plain text file.

It doesn't handle video/bookmark/pdf. If I have to save those, I put them in a
separate directory and make a note of it in the text file.

It's pretty well organized, thanks to org mode. It has a section that is by
date, like journal entries, and a section that's by topic. Since it's just a
single file, it's very easily searchable. It will never "go down". I don't
need to run a database (I tried using wiki software for the same purpose). I
can even "link" different sections, by having plain text labels. For example,
I can refer to "ZFS Setup 2009-01-01" which is another place in the document I
can search for.

I can "jump" to sections by using the orgmode annotation. Searching for "*
Computers" will go to that top level section.

I liked this system so much that I also use it at work. People are very
impressed that I can find things in my "notebook" so quickly. It's just text
search.

Websites disappear. Web apps disappear. Apps disappear. My text file, does
not.

~~~
inakarmacoma
But really working on the go with Android or iOS is painful, no?

~~~
brushfoot
As someone with a similar setup, I have a Google Doc named "Weekly Scratchpad"
with a shortcut on my Android home screen. At the end of the week, I copy
anything worth saving into my plain text file(s) and delete the rest.

------
abacate
I've been using Zim [1] as a knowledge database for around 2 years. I don't
like depending on online solutions which may suddenly disappear.

Together with some plugins for managing tasks, git and some script for
synchronizing repositories, it has been working great.

There are some limitations on this approach (ie, two persons editing the same
page concurrently is a no-no), but for my use-case it works perfectly.

I find it much more intuitive than org-mode, and the fact that it auto-
generates a "global" task list based on items spread across the whole notebook
makes it much easier to prioritize things.

[1] [https://zim-wiki.org/](https://zim-wiki.org/)

~~~
themodelplumber
I like Zim. For my Batcave I switched from Tiddlywiki to Tomboy to Zim to
Notecase Pro and finally switched from that over to files and folders using
the Geany editor and a sync service. So far this is the combination that seems
to survive software, OS, and environment changes best. Even on Android it's
not perfect, but it makes me happier than e.g. trying to use Zim on Android
:-)

------
macawfish
The bookmark workflow is an impressive demonstration that browsers have a lot
of room for improvement in their bookmarking tools.

I'm hoping (and optimistic) that the distributed web brings with it some
epiphanies about how to do better local knowledge management!

~~~
jhoechtl
Firefox sync with tags and knowing how to use the FF search bar to filter tags
comes close for me

~~~
dgsb
I didn't know we could search in the bookmarks from the address bar directly.
It is indeed a nice feature. Here is the documentation for reference
[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-
autocomplet...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplete-
firefox)

More specifically in the section Changing results on the fly

------
interfixus
My note app hopping days ended the moment I first encountered Joplin, which I
now use for almost all my writing.

Killer feature being the encrypted sync via more or less any kind of storage
back end (where presently I use Box via WebDav, but that's easily switched).
Seemless work across all my devices, all data in nice and portable markdown.

It fits my needs so well that I have taken the extraordinary step of allowing
the desktop version on my pc's, even though it is Electron based.

[https://joplinapp.org/](https://joplinapp.org/)

------
tenant
I have a single God ReadMe file in which I try to record all the facts that I
should know and 'recipes' that I might need to follow again. Such as that
shutting down windows does not dispose of kernel state whereas restart does.
Or how to do a certain task on the income tax site or how to set up an odbc
datasource in Windows. I've been keeping this file for years and I
periodically read through it as much to remind myself of what's in it as
anything else. It's saved me a lot of frustration when finding myself having
to do things again that I know it took me ages to figure out the previous time
but I have since forgotten.

------
brushfoot
I like the Plain Text Project's philosophy.
[https://plaintextproject.online/](https://plaintextproject.online/)

A tool is great for collaboration, but how much do you really need for a
personal KB? And how much effort do you want to spend migrating?

Then there's vendor lock-in, learning curves, etc.

A well-organized directory structure with plain text files gives you a data
store that won't become obsolete and can be used on any OS. I use CLI tools to
search (e.g., grep) and that's all the features I need right there.

------
analog31
I've mentioned this before, but I'd love to have a note taking app as
convenient as EverNote, but that lets me insert code cells a la Jupyter
notebook. I can barely think without Jupyter any more. Maybe that's not a good
thing, but it's sure handy.

~~~
theonething
What do you use Jupyter for? Feel like I'm missing out. :)

~~~
analog31
I'm a physicist by day, and work for a company that makes measurement
equipment. A lot of my work is quantitative, so I'm frequently "thinking" with
numbers, equations, graphs, etc. While I'm not employed as a programmer per
se, I use scientific programming quite heavily.

Jupyter has helped me take notes when I need to "think" quantitatively, and be
able to look at answers quickly, plus maintain a record that I can read later
on.

------
jayaram
This has been a workflow that served me well for the last couple of years -

Most of my stuff is on dropbox/google drive for accessing them across
different devices. I prefer tools that let me control where the data is and
not the other way around.

For all academic papers, documents, I use Zotero. you can use your favorite
pdf reader to annotate or take notes on pdf's and zotero will sync these. I
also love the feature where Zotero can automatically extract all annotations
from the pdf. (I some times save these as an org file)

If I am reading a longform web article or a blog post that I really think is
useful and helpful, I also save these to Zotero. The push to kindle extension
from fivefilters is an awesome tool that converts webpages to pdf.

I'm currently testing the memex extension from worldbrain to annotate and
organize my browsing history.

For all notes, journals, random thoughts, ideas, (both work and personal), I
use orgmode. (I recently switched from ZimWiki). Its been amazing so far. So
many things are easier to do orgmode although the learning curve for emacs is
pretty steep in the beginning.

On mobile, I use the orgzly app for accessing and taking notes! Its by far the
best android app I use so far.

practices >> tools!

------
dross
A little surprised that after 64 comments I've only seen 2 instances of
Evernote mentioned. I recently went back to using it and have been making use
of the clipper fairly often.
[https://twitter.com/dalevross/status/1214257684863692806](https://twitter.com/dalevross/status/1214257684863692806)
[https://www.evernote.com/l/AVVHBrGz_9BPMbh_Oxgp8qpibzVtX0tRn...](https://www.evernote.com/l/AVVHBrGz_9BPMbh_Oxgp8qpibzVtX0tRnug/)

I also found [https://dabble.me/](https://dabble.me/) the other day which
seemed like a nice slot in for quick thoughts with the ability to email to
your journal. I've heard that journaling manually works better but I really
dislike writing unless necessary.

One of my biggest gripes is with how many places I have my data in currently,
and as a dev, I should have done something already but that's another story.

I'll definitely have a look at Notion and org-mode having read the feedback
here along with a few other mentions elsewhere.

~~~
heavenlyblue
Evernote was useful 10 years ago.

~~~
gjm11
Would you like to elaborate on what changed over the last 10 years to make it
no longer useful?

------
Noumenon72
The problem with bookmarks is you're never going to have time to reread the
whole thing. I make a summary and put the source as a hyperlink so that if I
summarized wrong I can go read it again. Summaries are better because you can
organize summaries and have everything you know about enums together in a few
pages, rather than 20 bookmarks.

~~~
missosoup
You don't need to re-read all of your bookmarks. They're basically a hash
table keyed by some concept or some problem that you either list elsewhere or
remember in your head, that you can quickly use to pull up the full detail
content for the given key. Much like the actual physical bookmarks that are
just quick jump references to content you already know the summary of.

Don't use bookmarks as a 'I might come back and read this later'. Use them as
'I will need this later'.

~~~
tkainrad
I fully agree with this sentiment. It is very important to _not_ have the
feeling that you need to revisit all your bookmarks. In that case, you will
eventually feel overwhelmed and a bookmarks library will do more harm than
good.

------
JoachimS
I'm a bit surprised nobody seem to have mentioned Bear Notes.

I've used Onenote, Org Mode in Emacs but I am very happy to have discovered
Bear Notes ([https://bear.app/](https://bear.app/)) last. year. It has really
changed how much I document, work with text, store info etc.

Bear handles images, lists etc inline. It allows for very easy tagging
(creating hierarchies) etc. And it looks really nice. Even with good fonts,
Org Mode never really looked pleasing to me [0]. And I found that easthetics
is really important for me to actually use the tool.

Bear uses SQLite for storage, which can be accessed with any SQLite tool (I've
tested it). And it can also do batch export to a number or formats. The
exported files looks good and can easily be imported into other tools, for
example Org Mode (I've tested it). Bear can also export to PDF with styles. I
actually use this to export my notes as reports to the company board,
customers etc. And I've gotten compliments on how good the reports looks. ;-)

Finally Bear syncs easily. I can now work with my notes on the phone, iPad and
laptop.

If I only could get the tool to use a solid, non-blinking caret life would be
a bliss. Go Bear!

~~~
benhurmarcel
I'm looking forward to try Bear once they have a web client. I need access
from Windows/Linux.

------
chrisweekly
See also Roam ([https://roamresearch.com](https://roamresearch.com))

~~~
koevet
Just tried to sign-up on Roam. The sign-up page redirects to some tracking
site
([https://trackcmp.net/redir?actid=66602...](https://trackcmp.net/redir?actid=66602...)),
which is blocked by my pi-hole.

Not looking good.

~~~
chrisweekly
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.

~~~
swah
It's going to cost around 30 usd/mo so it's something for people that depend
on it.

------
marvinblum
We have build Emvi[1] to solve many of the problems when it comes to managing
a long living personal or teams knowledge base. The idea is, just as you
describe in your blog post with notions tables, that if you can remember a
fraction of the information you're looking for, you can find it using text
search, filters and sorting. A fixed structure won't cut it when you have to
maintain it for a long time and I believe it's better to add meta data (like
tags) to make it searchable. Emvi has a free tier with way higher limits than
notion, so that should work for most personal knowledge bases.

[1] [https://emvi.com](https://emvi.com)

------
agbell
I like plain text backed in google drive. I use The Archive [0] but Notational
Velocity [1] is popular as well. I don't have a bookmark system though. This
book is an excellent explanation of a plain text knowledge base system [2].

[0] [https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/](https://zettelkasten.de/the-
archive/)

[1]
[https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/](https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/)

[2]
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1542866502/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1542866502/)

------
monkin
It's too much for me, I couldn't be productive when using few services to
store notes. Too much distractions.

For my personal needs I use
[https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki](https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki) for
notes, ideas, todos, articles etc. I used Buku for few years, but then I
realised that I'm not using any bookmarks at all, so moved to native Safari
Bookmarks. :)

At the end I'm using GIT to have complete archive of each change. :)

------
l00sed
I love writing an blogging. Started reading into org-mode recently. Wish I had
a cleaner setup with my own website. I am pretty satisfied with fox's
bookmarks export though. The json it generates is easy to work with and
carries lots of useful meta data. I built a little processor to make my
bookmarks easily readable and organized here: [https://l-o-o-s-
e-d.net/bookmarks](https://l-o-o-s-e-d.net/bookmarks)

------
kirubakaran
You should check out [https://histre.com/](https://histre.com/) I've been
working on it and imho it is a better solution. With tools like Evernote,
Notion etc which are designed to do everything, you end up with a useless
write-only "knowledge base" that will make a hoarder blush.

------
parisidau
Any macOS users should check out DevonThink.

~~~
Pamar
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 it so that if
- as an example - I want to prepare a RPG campaign on modern day pirates I can
just write in the search box ["pirates" "shipping" "modern"] and hopefully get
a list of web articles that are relevant.

Now, I know that Devon has some sort of automatic indexing/clustering facility
for documents you have on your HD, but it is not really clear to me if it
works also with stuff you only have an URL to.

(If anyone has some alternatives to suggest I will be very interested - I
toyed with the idea of putting together an ElasticSearch VM for this but it
remained on the backburner for years).

Here is my original request here, btw:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18882167](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18882167)

~~~
Terretta
Maybe
[https://www.stclairsoft.com/HistoryHound/index.html](https://www.stclairsoft.com/HistoryHound/index.html)
or [https://historio.us](https://historio.us)

~~~
Pamar
Thanks a lot, I will check these which are totally new to me.

------
bumbledraven
I use SuperMemo ([http://www.supermemo.com](http://www.supermemo.com)).

------
madhadron
I'm surprised no one has mentioned SuperMemo and incremental reading as a
means of managing a knowledge base.

~~~
steve1977
Ahh incremental reading in SuperMemo. It makes my Wikipedia addication so much
more manageable.

------
aizatto
For personal/private notes, I built
[https://www.build.my/logbook](https://www.build.my/logbook)

For public notes, I use GitBook [https://www.aizatto.com/why-
gitbook](https://www.aizatto.com/why-gitbook)

------
jlroger
Thanks for the post. Will check out Notion for sure. Although I'm a little
worried about the vendor lock-in - as others have mentioned as well. Although
I think it is ok to surrender some robustness for the ease of use.

------
hokkos
I also use notion, but I don't put my bookmarks in a database very long, its
only for the one I don't have time to categorize, and I try to add them in a
neatly organized tree structure.

------
karlicoss
Great writeup!

I've got quite similar system in spirit and aims, just instead of lower Notion
layer, using org-mode. It ends up searchable, synchronised with all devices,
available offline and with great tooling for organizing and processing
information.

> While documenting my configuration, especially my command-line workflows, I
> identified some shortcomings

Can't agree more! I've considerably simplified so many things while writing up
on my setups and publishing code -- I guess it's easier to sneak in
unnecessary complexity when it's all in your head.

> They are, however, not well suited for keeping extensive bookmarks
> libraries.

Agree state of browser bookmarking is a bit of a shame, interfaces are
restricted and bloated with non-functional features. At first I switched to
Pinboard [0], but after a while I realized even that was not enough for me and
wrote Grasp [1], browser extension to capture stuff directly in org-mode.

> Examples of things that should not be Chrome bookmarks

Yep, eventually reached exactly the same conclusion! I often want to add
private notes, more context etc and it's just not compatible with standard
bookmark solutions.

> Taking Notes

Also big fan of notetaking, I basically write down any remotely meaningful
thought if I don't have time to exercise it at the moment (via org-capture).
Also using same file for everything and just processing it now and then. Same
for ideas for new projects, blog updates, etc -- these are just entries in
org-mode.

> ..it requires some discipline. I tag and annotate new entries, that I added
> via the web clipper, about twice a month

Yep, doing same, going through clipped links in org-mode, tagging and putting
priorities. Then I can sort by priority and start reading/refiling etc.
Eventually non-important stuff just sinks down as I don't have time to process
everything, but at least it's searchable.

> For example, it is quite easy to search through questions you have answered
> on Stack Overflow. It is also not a problem to go back to your Hacker News
> posts or search through projects you starred on GitHub.

I actually find that even though in theory it's easy, in practice sometimes
you don't remember where exactly you need to search for something, so you end
up going through 'check reddit saves', 'check HN saves', 'check twitter faves'
cycles, etc. So I'm automatically converting these into org-mode and they are
searchable as any other org-mode file. I describe it in more detail here [2].

P.S. Great and clean design, especially the sticky navigation on the right! I
might borrow the idea :) By the way, I tried in responsive mode and it seems
to disappear alltogether, perhaps you could display it on top if the screen is
too small?

0\. [https://pinboard.in](https://pinboard.in)

1\. [https://beepb00p.xyz/grasp.html](https://beepb00p.xyz/grasp.html)

2\. [https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html#other](https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-
search.html#other)

~~~
tkainrad
Thank you for the nice feedback, much appreciated!

> Ad using native bookmark sources, such as HN/Twitter/...

You are right, this is not ideal and it also happens to me that I am no longer
sure where to look first. On the plus side, I do find it eventually, even if
it's only the second native source I check. Atm, it seems to me that this is
still better than duplicating everything in my other bookmarking layers. I
will read your posts to find out more about your system, honestly don't know
much about org-mode yet.

PS: Very glad to hear that! Especially, since I don't do much frontend work
usually. I will think of a way to include a ToC also on small screens. Please,
feel free to steal any idea you like. Then I don't have to feel as bad for
looking into some of yours. I really like the pilcrows next to the headings
and the dotted lines for highlighting sections on your site.

------
rasta78
A Todoist app, mac notes or OneNote and pocket to bookmark pages. Why over
complicate things!? And if you want to have a framework to memorize things try
PolarBookself and Anki flashcards.

------
ngcc_hk
What is difference of this and bear on iOS and macOS which I used everyday
now.

Yes depend up server and paid subscription. But use tag and sync across
multiple devices

------
crusty511
I just use Atom with enhanced-markdown-preview and ascii-tree.

It's flexible enough for re-organisation and I can convert to lots of formats
with pandoc.

------
6nf
Off topic sorry but why bother with the cookie agreement on the overlay footer
like this? You are not giving users the ability to opt out so this just annoys
people without making the website GDPR compliant.

~~~
tkainrad
I will soon disable this for non-EU visitors. A more sophisticated cookie
agreement banner is not so trivial to do with static sites. As long as
everybody is doing it this way, even big corporations, I will keep this
approach for EU visitors.

~~~
chacha2
It might as well not be there if there's no way to opt out of the cookie. It's
not GDPR compliant either way.

------
rnikander
I use folders full of Omni Outliner documents. I like it, but to me it's
missing some features.

------
kerng
I think OneNote is the best option. I have been trying alternatives but
nothing seems to come close.

------
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.

------
dope9967
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.

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

~~~
dope9967
True. There is an export option for notes in Google Keep, and I don't think
they will just shut the service down instantly without warning. I guess
there's no silver bullets, every option sucks in a way. You go oldschool with
a text document or directory structure, you loose out on usability, if you use
any of the services there's a risk of them being shutdown, or you host some
service yourself and take on costs of doing so.

------
sbmthakur
Has anyone used Pocket for personal knowledge base?

------
thiagomgd
Anyone used WikiJS?

------
svnpenn
Where is source code for this blog?

~~~
tkainrad
You can get the general theme here:

[https://github.com/luizdepra/hugo-coder/](https://github.com/luizdepra/hugo-
coder/)

My blog itself is not open source. I thought about this for a while, but I
think the pressure to keep everything cleaned up, documented, and organized is
not worth the benefits in this case. If you have some specific requests, feel
free to get in touch and I might be able to help you.

~~~
svnpenn
I mean yeah, people might want you to do that, but you dont have to.

Its your life, and your code. You can post it, and keep it messy if you want
to.

