The other night, @verso tweeted a ques­tion about run­ning a lit­tle wiki on a home file server.  I responded with Tid­dly­Wiki, which is a whole wiki con­tained in a sin­gle HTML file.  It actu­ally may or may not ful­fill her needs, since there are huge con­cur­rency and remote access issues — it’s designed to be run from a thumb drive and used by a sin­gle user.  This lit­tle bit of advice prompted me to write up a more detailed descrip­tion of how I take notes.

The kinds of notes I keep fall nicely into three cat­e­gories: deep stor­age, midrange, and ephemeral.  In the fol­low­ing sec­tions, I will describe each type and show what tools I use for them.

Deep Stor­age

Deep stor­age includes things that I know I will need in the future, but really don’t care about this sec­ond.  What size air fil­ter fits in the fur­nace?  (20“x25“x1”) What type of motor oil does my car use?  (10W30 x 5) What’s my fre­quent flyer mem­ber­ship num­ber?  What port for­ward­ing rules do I have set up in the fire­wall?  What’s the pinout of a ser­ial port?  A USB port?  What route does the #19 take ver­sus the #20?  What was that recipe for really good lemon­ade?  What .vimrc con­fig file do I typ­i­cally use?

It is all stuff I need to know some­day, but do not need imme­di­ate con­tin­ual access to.  It also sub­di­vides into two cat­e­gories: stuff I con­sider pri­vate or private-ish and stuff that would be of gen­eral use to oth­ers.  Obvi­ously, the pri­vate infor­ma­tion includes my fre­quent flyer num­ber, med­ical his­tory, and even the fur­nace fil­ter size — because it’s not like any­one else really cares about it.  The gen­eral infor­ma­tion includes con­fig files, shell scripts, tech­ni­cal HOW­TOs and what­not.  They are things I did a bit of research on (like inte­grat­ing Word­Press with Live­jour­nal, tun­nel­ing a PPP con­nec­tion over SSH, and finally fig­ur­ing out an X Win­dows con­fig file that sup­ports mul­ti­ple mon­i­tors on my crappy video card) and would not mind shar­ing with the world.

For stor­ing and access­ing pri­vate infor­ma­tion, I use Ever­note.  They have a great notepad sys­tem that I can get to from the web, from a desk­top app, and from the iPhone, all access­ing and syn­chro­niz­ing with the same cen­tral­ized data­s­tore.  The iPhone bit is impor­tant because I never know when, exactly, I might need this infor­ma­tion.  I may not have easy access to a com­puter, for instance, when I’m look­ing up the specifics of a bus route (admit­tedly, the PDX Bus iPhone app has access to route maps, but I like my Ever­note page with all of the routes I com­monly use side-by-side in a locally cached document).

For deep-storage of research, notes, and other things that might be of use to oth­ers, I run a per­sonal Medi­aWiki at http://stackoverflow.org/wiki/.  The instal­la­tion is locked down to a sin­gle user account partly to pre­vent spam, but mostly because I am not ter­ri­bly inter­ested in direct col­lab­o­ra­tion on this con­tent.  I am happy to chat via email and incor­po­rate sug­ges­tions, but I do not need the over­head of polic­ing changes by unknown per­sons of my .bashrc file (be they benign or mali­cious modifications).

Ephemeral Stor­age

The other extreme is ephemeral stor­age.  I take a good num­ber of notes that have a shelf-life no longer than a few hours or a few days.  This is, of course, what the Hip­ster PDA is all about.  You can read more about my his­tory with the Hip­ster PDA by read­ing posts tagged with the hip­ster­pda key­word here at Net­ninja.  A friend sug­gests a movie, book, or tele­vi­sion show to check out later, so it gets jot­ted in the Hip­ster PDA.  I need to pick some­thing up at the store on the way home, so it goes into the Hip­ster PDA.  What tasks do I need to com­plete today at the office, or what tasks did I com­plete yes­ter­day that need to be reported at the Scrum-style stand-up meet­ing?  The email address or web­site of the per­son I just met, it goes in the Hip­ster PDA.

Some of these things go in to the Hip­ster PDA, kick around for a bit, then get crossed off.  Other things migrate into tasks lists, address books, or Ama­zon Wish­lists, depend­ing on con­text.  I used to be a die-hard Palm fan and used my elec­tronic orga­nizer for all such lit­tle notes, but the access time was nasty.  Think about the iPhone; if you want to jot some­thing down you have to pause your con­ver­sa­tion, pull out the phone, turn it on, enter your 4-digit unlock code (your whole life is in your iPhone, so you’re lock­ing it, right?), find and launch the right app, wait for it to load, locate the right screen to enter the note, then fum­ble with the key­pad to type in the infor­ma­tion.  This is, of course, made more com­pli­cated if you are simul­ta­ne­ously using the iPhone for a tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion instead of a face-to-face con­ver­sa­tion.  The (over-)simplicity of the Hip­ster PDA is a fea­ture, not a prob­lem.  It’s quick, imme­di­ate data entry.  The fil­ing and cat­e­go­riz­ing of the infor­ma­tion can be left until later.

Midrange Stor­age

Smack-dab in the mid­dle of these are notes regard­ing things I am work­ing on.  They are too big and detailed to fit in a Hip­ster PDA (and may include things that would be a pain to tran­scribe, like code snip­pets, extracts of log files, half-formed poten­tial blog posts, and the like.  The shelf-life of these things ranges from weeks to months.  They are not detailed, refined, or con­clu­sive enough to get pub­lished in the Stack­over­flow Wiki.  Ever­note feels a bit too cum­ber­some, and often the for­mat­ting gets in the way. 

For a long time, I had a con­tin­u­ally chang­ing TODO.TXT file on my desk­top.  I would add stuff to the top, remove stuff from the end, and edit and insert through­out the whole file.  It worked, but it may not have been the best solu­tion in the world.

Cur­rently, I use a “wiki” (I have that in quotes, yes, and will explain why in a bit) called Tid­dly­Wiki.  You can see it in action as well as down­load a copy for your­self at http://tiddlywiki.com/.  More detailed instruc­tions, expla­na­tions, and FAQs are at http://tiddlywiki.org (which is, iron­i­cally enough, run­ning on Medi­aWiki).  Tid­dly­Wiki is a “wiki” that is entirely self-contained in a sin­gle HTML file and runs entirely in your browser via JavaScript.  As you make changes to your Tid­dly­Wiki, they are writ­ten back to that very same HTML file.  This makes it quite use­ful for keep­ing on your com­puter and even car­ry­ing around with you on a thumb drive.  But if you are used to a “reg­u­lar” wiki, there is a bit of a learn­ing curve.  Each “page” you cre­ate lives in the same web page as sec­tions that can appear and dis­ap­pear.  These “pages” are actu­ally called “tid­dlers” and I was orig­i­nally told to think of them as 3x5 cards or sheets of paper.  You can bring them into view and push them out of view.  You can even have mul­ti­ple tid­dlers open side-by-side (or, rather, over-under) on the same screen.  It does not quite work like a “nor­mal” wiki, but this design has many of the same advan­tages as a notepad or TODO list except you can also hide sec­tions that are not ter­ri­bly rel­e­vant to what you are inter­ested in at any given time.

What really makes the TODO.TXT or Tid­dly­Wiki slick is Drop­box.  Because Drop­box lets you syn­chro­nize mul­ti­ple com­put­ers, I can have a copy on my Linux desk­top at work, my lap­top (which moves between work and home), and my desk­top at home.  I can even get to it (read-only, due to the way the JavaScript works) on my iPhone, but have never really needed that.  It gets shared and updated every­where, and I do not have to think about mov­ing it around between machines.

Tasks

Tasks are sort of tan­gen­tial to the deep/medium/ephemeral infor­ma­tion described above, but worth includ­ing in this dis­cus­sion.  For me, if a sin­gle task or check­list of tasks is not work-related, Omni­Fo­cus is the place it goes.  The not-work-related limit is due to the fact that my main OS at work is Linux, and it has just been too dif­fi­cult to switch from work­sta­tion to iPhone or lap­top for task man­age­ment.  This is where I put short-term tasks like Ebenezer’s reoc­cur­ring bi-weekly bath.  Longer-term wish list type stuff goes in there, too, like var­i­ous house remodel ideas.  Even things I want to be reminded about in the future go into here: next year’s High­land Games are a long ways off, but a month before­hand I want to get a reminder so I can free up the week­end, get tick­ets, and talk to friends about it.  Of course, Omni­Fo­cus has an iPhone client, too.  I do not find the iPhone client quite as use­ful as the Hip­ster PDA, but I still occa­sion­ally run it.

And Finally…

So that is me and my notes and tasks.  I’d love to hear if any of this works for you, or if you have sug­ges­tions, ques­tions, alter­na­tives, or improve­ments to any of this. 

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy:

1. Ever­note?
2. Get­ting Things Done
3. iPhone turnkey hackery
4. Don’t for­get the milk
5. The Office Wiki Stored in my iPhone

Tagged as: evernote, hipsterpda, mediawiki, notes, productivity, storage, tasks, tiddlywiki, wiki