I was just wondering, if there’s a special reason for this configuration for file names, or what are your reasons. Could explain it in more detail, which are your reasons, and if you currently are using this or any other schema. Regards.

Other writers: From his essays, I twigged that Martin Gardner kept drawers of index cards, meticulously cross-indexed, with relevant articles or snippets from his reading paper-clipped to them. He’d draw on these when writing his books/essays.

The New Yorker magazine also had a legendary cross-indexed 3×5 index card catalog of the magazine’s contents going back to the founding. Their insurance company identified the index cards as a risk, which led them to move to a database, and then to scan in the issues, and then to release the magazine’s contents on DVD (I’m getting them for Christmas). The 3×5 card system has now been abandoned. (Read this in a NY Times article and an interview on NPR.)

Journalist James Fallows (who worked with Msft on the development of OneNote, I think, esp from a journlist perspective) is a computer buff from way back. He touted the use of old DOS programs like Grandview (outliner program to help him organize his stories) and Lotus Agenda (“a spreadsheet for words,” which had pretty amazing natural-language processing of text on the fly– Google on that and breathe in the nostalgia). He used Agenda to collect snippets of everything, create categories and views on the fly, and essentially keep track of his research and notes.

Nowadays, he uses Brainstorm and Mindmanager, and who knows what all.

The novelist Robertson Davis kept a writer’s notebook of ideas, characters, etc (near to my heart as a writer). He numbered each page, and each entry on a page got a letter. When it came time to write a novel, he noted that entries 9F, 10A, and 12B related to a single character, and he drew the threads together that way.

I’ve also had (and have) the info-packrat disease, which fueled my purchase of Agenda, Infoselect, Ecco Pro, and god knows how many others.

The computer columnist Jim Seymour wrote somewhere, and it made an impression on me, that there is information that likes to be structured — by chronology, by someone’s name, by the alphabet, by location, by function, by program name, whatever — and then there is loose info that you can’t define a container for YET, but that you can’t bear to lose. This has caused me sleepless nights and I debate its core usefulness to me, often.

The 43Folders post on living inside a single text file inspired me to try again at home with Notetab (Windows text editor). It has a simple structuring facility it calls an outline, but which is simply a flat list of topic headings on the left, and the text on the right. I’ve found I prefer the flat headings to hierarchical; they remind me of keeping notes in my Palm Memo (ie, “Books/Loaned to,” “Books/Library,” etc). it’s also like spreading everything out on a table so I can scan it quickly; nothing is hidden underneath another topic; everything is on the surface.

Lately, I’m trying to bookmark less often, save info less often, UNLESS I have a specific project in mind. In that case, I create the folders/structures to contain that info and the info naturally adheres to it.

At work, I use a dead-simple program called Electric Notebook (http://lincoln.midcoast.com/~ian/notebook.html), a very personal (ie, idiosyncratic) program with few of the amentities of OneNote, except that it can sit open all day, I type stuff in as it occurs to me, with (I hope) the right keywords, and then I search on it as I need to. Which is never as often as I think. It’s an electronic logbook, basically. It’s based on just keeping stuff chronologically, but in a rough-and-ready fashion. I find that it’s dumbed-down enough to suit my simple needs very nicely. I find, though, that I use it at home less than I use Notetab.

For structured info at work, I use an OpenOffice Writer document to simulate Word’s Document Map function (which is similar to Notetab’s outline function — is there a pattern??). This document is called “infoindex” and holds various Unix commands, checklists, timecard chargecodes, etc., that demand to be stored and used as reference, not stuff that’s part of the passing scene. Stuff I input into Notebook that’s worth remembering or referring back to more than once gets migrated to the infoindex.

I find this two-pronged approach works well for me. Electric Notebook for unstructured info, Infoindex for structured info. And it’s a simple enough process that I can use it when I’m distracted or under the weather.

I would also refer you to the c2.com wiki’s entires on LogBook (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LogBook) and ElectronicLogBook (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ElectronicLogBook).

Sorry for the long post! But this is a big interest of mine.

Mike

What served me well from 1988 to 2004 was a small, spiral-bound notebook made by DayTimer. The model number is 98160. You can see them here

This little book had several distinct advantages.

1. Spiral bind lays flat.

2. Pages are numbered (68 pages per book).

3. Small enough (3.5 x 6.5 inches) to fit in a pocket.

4. Fit beautifully in my Filofax.

I would write the date at the top of each page and then write all of my notes for that day. Some days ran to several pages. Everything went in there: phone numbers, notes from phone calls, ideas, quotes from articles or speeches or conversations. I usually filled up 2 or 3 books each year. One year I filled 5.

I think I got the idea from one of Jerry Pournelle’ BYTE columns.

http://www.byte.com/art/9601/sec13/art1.htm

For a while I kept a simple database of the books’ contents. Wished I’d kept it up.

(Edited by pigpogm – just removing a long URL that was breaking the page flow – replaced it with a link.)

Jim: XML is a step in the right direction, but I don’t know how much it helps practically – the application still has to be able to understand the specific markup used in the XML file, doesn’t it?. Certainly better than anything binary, though – at least the text should all be readable and unederstandable, and in some way parseable.

Rob: Google desktop certainly can help with the searching, but doesn’t help with file formats becoming unsupported over the years. I ended up uninstalling it, as it seemed to be taking too many resources, but the searching was quite impressive.

mc: Mail.app stores everything as text? Nice. I assume it uses one of the standard old Unix mail formats, then, which should remain fully supported for a long time, and at least searchable and readable as text pretty much indefinitely. Sounds like quite a nice setup you have there – the Newton still has many fans.

Steve: I only say HTML slightly less than text, as the markup does change a bit over the years, but you’re probably right – old HTML 2 files should still work just fine in any modern browser, and they’re still just as searchable and readable in a text editor. I thought current versions of Word would still open pretty much any previous version of Word’s files, along with WordPerfect 5.1, WordStar, and the like, but I have to admit, I’ve not tried it. Reopening and saving in new versions would be a lot of work each time, but would keep things up to date. I’d have thought JPEG should remain pretty much safe, since the web is so heavily dependent on it – can’t see JPEGs becoming unsupported in the next ten or twenty years. Not too easy to search for text, though – next version of OneNote will do it. You make a good point about CDs and DVDs, though. I’d probably keep everything on hard disk, though, with CDs and DVDs for backups. We’re probably not talking about that much data, but if we’re including such things as digital camera snaps, it could certainly add up to a lot.

All: Sorry for the formatting problems in the comments – it seems to have been eating line breaks since upgrading WordPress – grabbed a new version of the MarkDown plug-in, and that seems to have fixed things. Thanks again for the input.

HTML should be as good as text, provided you keep the markup extremely simple. It’s only text after all.

I personally prefer HTML over text as it is structured but simple. And as text, it is searchable by command-level tools.

jpeg? not nearly as durable as HTML since HTML is as good as text.

MS Word? If you look back over the history of Word, you will find Microsoft changes the file format of .doc almost every version of Word. And backwards compatibility is lost every 2, 3 versions. This is extremely unlikely to endure.

The only truly ‘safe’ way to keep documents readable, is to maintain your entire archive in current formats. Using MS Word as an example, then, you would upgrade Word/Office with each new version (at least every other version) and re-open all your old Word documents, saving them under the new format, and re-archiving.

Ditto with jpegs and any other binary file formats.

This approach has the added benefit of keeping your store of hard-drives, CDs or DVDs, relatively ‘fresh’ – though it does add a lot of effort to the whole process. For that reason, I’d say a yearly ‘archive refresh’ would be smart policy. Probably shouldn’t take more than a weekend?

Over at the PigPog Blog is a great post about Storing Nuggets of Information, calling for ideas. This is something I’ve been struggling with for many years myself, and have only lately been making any sort of headway. When I think about all the years …