Re: [OT] How do you keep your reference data?

[tycho garen <garen@tychoish.com>]

On Sun, Nov 08, 2009 at 04:24:39PM -0600, Marcelo de Moraes Serpa wrote:
> Information that has no potential next action associated but that still has
> potential reference value and that you'd like to keep around, how and where
> do you keep it ?

I (too) used to be a wiki person, and indeed I kept a pretty active personal
wiki with novels, research for novels, scholarly work, task
management, and the like all within an instance of Ikiwiki that I ran
locally on my laptop. While I liked the fact that I could create new
wiki pages at whim, and that I didn't need to fight to figure out
where the info fitted in my 'system'.

The problem with the wiki system, for me, is that wikis really need at
want some serious ongoing maintenance and attention to prevent entropy
from taking over. Wikis are about collaboration, and the great thing
about wikis when they work a lot of people have to be there doing
little bits of work: editing, writing, cataloging/categorization,
organization and the like. When it was just me, I never wanted to do
that work.

I wrote a couple of posts about how I'm using org-mode to deal with
the instant collection of useless facts and bits of
information. They're located here:

http://www.tychoish.com/2009/09/fact-files/

http://www.tychoish.com/2009/03/fact-file-and-orbital-mechanics/

----

I'm not an "everything in org and nothing but org" kind of guy. Here's
how my system works, in brief:

- I have a bunch of org files for major projects and spheres of my
  life: my day/employment job, various major writing projects (mostly
  fiction) have their own folders, I have a 'technology and hacking'
  file, I have a general file, and a couple of other odds and
  ends. These files have notes, tasks, projects, and I mostly edit
  them via org-remember, org-agenda, and a little bit of org-refile,
  alas (it would be better to edit these files more organically.) 

- I also have a "data.org" file which I use as a fact file as defined
  in the blog posts. It doesn't really have tasks, though I do have a
  couple of reading-related statuses: "PROCESS" and the like.

- All org files are in their own git repository (~/org/). Major fiction
  projects also have their own git repositories. Smaller projects
  including short fiction, blog writing, and the like all share a
  "writing" git repository. There's also a repo to track content as it
  relates to my day-job work. 

- I sometimes add specific .org files from other repositories and
  locations, to the agenda view.

It seems to work pretty well.

Cheers,
sam

-- 
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garen@tychoish.com
http://www.tychoish.com/
http://www.cyborginstitute.com/
"don't get it right, get it written" -- james thurber