just stumbled across your "personal encyclopedia" memex.cc. Impressive stuff! I've just started working through my ~10 year backlog of notes and setting them up wiki-style on my site. I can't wait until I'm 7 years into the project!
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Nice! If you want to see the source code for mine, it's really simple: github.com/Ceasar/Encyclo Just RST files in a directory that I convert to HTML in a Flask app. If your notes are in Markdown or similar, I bet you can instantly turn them into a wiki with a similar approach.
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This is great! It definitely made me rethink my current system as a series of CLI power tools that I can mix and match rather than thinking of it as a whole "program".
Fantastic mental model.
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I hadn't thought about fully internalized that idea. Actually really interesting. Right now I have a force-graph tool, a presentation tool (the memex.cc), and then I just use grep a lot. But the source of truth is always just a directory of text files.
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I guess a whole Zetelkasten system could be trivially implemented with text files. Wondering what other tools would be useful and what the best way to share them would be. I'd want updates on any tools you're working on for instance.
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I've always thought about my project as "note-taking, but for hackers". Keeping it plaintext meant ultimate portability and no lock-in. Framing as a flat directory of text files that can be analyzed by scripts means it's trivial to onboard, just throw your files in a directory.
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I guess one thing that seems limiting is file types. But maybe the tools can just try to do their best given the semantics offered by the file type. I can imagine new file types would emerge that are backward compatible with tools but which offer new features.
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cc Have any of you thought about this direction for organizing notes?
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I’m a fan of plaintext files and the UNIX philosophy—mostly because I view this problem space as substantially unsolved, so I don’t think any format is trustworthy enough to earn lock-in. It is, alas, true that plaintext has many limitations in this space.