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I'm thinking of going primitive, with discursion into zettelkasten
40hz:
Just out of curiosity …
What are people doing with all this information they’re curating and cataloging with these various pieces of software? To what purpose? Or maybe even: to what avail?
I’m more curious about the individual “business” use cases rather than the supporting technology. Technology and solutions that offer varying degrees of utility aren’t that difficult to run down. God knows there’s tons of software out there. But the reasons to employ said technology can sometimes be less obvious. At least to me.
So help me out. What is/are your goal(s). What’s it all for? What are you guys doing with all this information you’re gathering? :)
Dormouse:
What are people doing with all this information they’re curating and cataloging with these various pieces of software? To what purpose? Or maybe even: to what avail?
-40hz (November 14, 2020, 10:58 AM)
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Most of the time that isn't what I'm doing. Most of what I have is what I write. Stuff I don't write myself is just linked.
Mainstream uses
Writing and research.
It's a large part of what I do, and always has been.
It's pretty much what it's designed for, though the userbase in Obsidian seems to have a huge number of students.
Related uses
Work and professional stuff. Again really, it's largely writing and research. Just differently dressed.
Anything money related
Research on things to be bought, or suppliers, what's paid.
Ditto for pensions, investments etc. I'll probably record my tax stuff in it this year (that bit being purely local and secure).
Everything else
I'm actually using it for nearly everything.
Eg in the garden, what was planted where and how it did.
Anything at all.
My basic rule is that if something requires collection of information, weighing it up and making a decision - especially if it's something I might have to do again in future - then it goes in unless I can work my way through just by remembering (I'm not trying to give myself unnecessary work); or unless I don't get round to it.
But I'm still working my way around the system, so changes are still likely.
Of course, I'm only using it for everything because, I'm already using it and it works and it's easier to use one process for everything.
And having freedom to do that across the board makes it easier to innovate and adjust.
And even more of course, I couldn't write the above in markdown without adding HTML. And that was deprecated in HTML 5 for a while.
wraith808:
Just out of curiosity …
What are people doing with all this information they’re curating and cataloging with these various pieces of software? To what purpose? Or maybe even: to what avail?
I’m more curious about the individual “business” use cases rather than the supporting technology. Technology and solutions that offer varying degrees of utility aren’t that difficult to run down. God knows there’s tons of software out there. But the reasons to employ said technology can sometimes be less obvious. At least to me.
So help me out. What is/are your goal(s). What’s it all for? What are you guys doing with all this information you’re gathering? :)
-40hz (November 14, 2020, 10:58 AM)
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Writing, Research, and Project Management for Technical projects for Home and Work
Writing, Research, and Project Management for Non-Technical projects for Home and Work
To-Dos and Notes from my general days
Pretty much everything at this point. As Dormouse says above, I'm already in it for my projects, so it's just second nature at this point to use it for anything that comes up. Doctor Appointments, Maintenance Directory and Logs, etc.
And my notes are pure MD. I have other documents linked in the repository, but everything as far as the notes is just MD.
JavaJones:
I have a multiplicity of needs and tools. I'd rather have fewer tools, but nothing does everything I want yet.
I have a daily "life logging" practice that is a combination of work and personal items, including some "quantified self" stuff like when I woke up, how much I weighed, what I ate, etc., as well as work periods and tasks done or things accomplished, documentation of thoughts, feelings, ideas, etc. One of the reasons I got interested in Roam-like linking approaches is because it's a lot less work to connect my daily log to individual pages where I can analyze, etc. So now I can link to e.g. [[Weight]] and I have all my weight entries drawn straight from my journal, I don't have to actually open the page to add that day's weight, the "backlinks" feature shows them all for me just by linking. And that way I can read them in my more narrative journal too, without having to open a bunch of related pages to get the full picture of a day. Best of both worlds. That's just one example. Right now I do all of this in Roam, but plan to move either to Logseq or Obsidian, and maybe Codex long-term.
I also keep track of a lot of life, project, and activity stuff like Dormouse and Wraith. Pages for projects, entrepreneurial ideas, etc. I find the outline structure too rigid for this stuff, so I used to use Quip (and still have a lot of data in it), and have been slowly migrating this stuff to Notion. But not sure I like Notion enough to keep it all there... Depending on how well Anytype shapes up, I might be able to move the database stuff there.
Then there is regular data sets with some reasonable amount of commonalities, i.e. properties, that I want to store, sort, etc. Things like Recipes, Articles or Books to read, etc. These all go in Notion databases at present, they used to be simple lists or header-divided pages in Quip. The databases are better, but still not perfect.
Then there is the actual writing I do, mostly for planned blog posts (I say "planned" because I post them very seldom). This I do in Notion right now, it's the closest analog to a "web presentation" I can write in, and it's faster and better than working in Wordpress directly for me.
Ultimately I'd like as much of this stuff as possible to all be in a single system because interrelation and data re-use is incredibly powerful, time-saving, and useful. As a simple example, being able to reference the data in a property/field of a database from regular text, or link to a database entry in entirety from some other page (Notion can do the latter but not the former), etc. Or even embed a database record, or an entire table (Notion can do the latter, not the former).
That covers most of the non-work stuff. For work I chose and implemented Fibery, but that's getting pretty tangential to the topic of this thread.
Shades:
I want to stay local, I like wikilinks in the text, plus the bits of markup and formatting that I use while writing and editing.
I'm happy for formatting for publication to be separate, but markdown doesn't do that anyway.
-Dormouse (November 14, 2020, 04:14 AM)
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Sorry to remain harping on about AsciiDoc. But I know that for AsciiDoc there are applications that you can host locally. Whatever documentation you create, it will be automatically translated to (static) webpages and served locally or on a hosted solution. In case that is your thing. The tool I talk about is called: Hugo I see that it also supports MarkDown nowadays.
For those that really wish to introduce versioning into their documentation (technical documentation writers come to mind), for those that have collected a lot of documentation all over the place, this software is capable of searching local or hosted projects for any document and create a complete manual from it, all automatically. I have seen examples of this system working with a hosted GitLab instance with many different repositories. This software is called: Antora (more descriptions here).
Looks to be an AsciiDoc only solution. But I'm sure there is similar software for MarkDown.
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