MyTextFile

By Doug | Published: May 19, 11

I learned of MyTextFile from the TakingNote web site.

The design metaphor for this web app comes from the old days when geek-like people collected and managed their writings in one large ASCI file. MyTextFile is one large ASCI file in the sky.

There are advantages to the single text file structure:

  • Full search is quick and comprehensive (a benefit which has been reduced on the Mac by Spotlight and by desk top search tools on Windows)
  • Unstructured data has low over head in the filing process (One never stops to ponder “Humm, where will I put that file?” or “Humm, what will I name that file?”) You just add new stuff to the end of old stuff.

Many who once used a single text file structure have moved to personal Wikis which have many of the same benefits of one-large-text-file with the addition of visible topic connections. But there are holdouts. The simple solution of using an ever lengthening file for notes and logs has adherents as a google of “one text file” will show you. There is always the nostalgia of the early days. At their inception these text logs were posted to servers, set to public read access, and became the weblogs or blogs of today.

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Making a Reading Notebook From a Private Web Site

By Doug | Published: December 10, 10

Sometimes we just get away from ourselves. I wrote up the post below, built the web site discussed, actually got the whole thing up and functioning nicely. That was before I saw that InstaPaper already had an excellent clipping function built in, out of the box, already there and waiting for me, and that it would do the exact same thing as the system I designed.

So let the attached be a memorial to all those poorly thought out development projects, the ones best deliberated more deeply before begun, the one’s best killed when they are young, at the initiation stage, before we do the palm-to-the-forehead-slap of realization, the cruel knowledge arriving of just how much time we just wasted…

Making a Reading Notebook From a Private Web Site

I’ve been keeping notes on my reading for years. Pre-PC I jotted notes on 3 x 5 cards. Post-PC I typed notes in various electronic formats. Pre-web I cut out and filed articles. Post-web I saved them with a few clicks. For a manic and frustrating period I began scanning all my old paper articles until I abandoned that Sisyphean task. These notes, in all their formats, go back a decade or more, and their maintenance was a significant factor in the creation of my File System Information Manager.

Over the past three years managing my fiction writing has taken greater emphasis in the FSIM, but I still capture a lot of random notes and text from my non-book reading. (For my book reading I have a separate process called “Readers Notes,” that works directly in the FSIM.) But I’m reading on the iPad now so my old system doesn’t work any longer.

Historic Process

For a long time I PDF’ed most articles. I’d read the PDF and not the web page, highlighting and annotating as I went along. These files make up the bulk of the “Topics” category in my FSIM. The benefits of the PDF format is the retention of the graphical layout of the page, which can have subtle information in it, highlighting is easy, and so is notation. The downsides: The files are big and there’s a multi-step PDF generation process. An addition benefit is, as others have commented, that the PDF format, along with ASCI text, is about as future proof an archiving format as we will find.

For a while I grabbed articles as WebArchives, which I found unsatisfactory, or as HTML, which was better, but was not functional for annotations.

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Modifying the InfoBase for the iPad

By Doug | Published: December 3, 10

A comment on another post asked, “how’s it going with PlanText?”

And the short answer is, not so well.

Not that the application is not wonderful. I find PlainText to be the best of the iPad/iPhone note taking and writing applications available. It’s better than Elements (which I find aesthetically unattractive) iAWriter (which I find functionally constrictive) and SimpleNote (which is architecturally off when it comes to its support for a text file based system).

My problem is how PlainText, the file system, and desktop editors like Notational Velocity interact. It’s caused me to rethink bits of my system, if only on the margins.

PlainText relies on folders for categorization. I think this is very smart. Folders are easy, inherent in the file system, and durable. They have the added benefit of managing sync volumes since by definition they break sets of files up into smaller groups.

But in a single folder system, like the one that is required for Notational Velocity, this categorization by folder just doesn’t work. With NV, or any other single folder based info management system, categorization relies on full text search and various in-text tags. I uses WikiCase (aka CamelCase) tags in my entries prepended with a # – against which a search with spotlight of other full text search tools usually brings up the right subset of items.

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Bob Benmosche’s Cancer

By Doug | Published: October 26, 10

On hearing of Bob’s illness, I picture him yelling at Death, and I see Death stalking away, defeated.

And I remember Virgil…

Mors aurem vellens, “Vivite” ait, “venio.”

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FCS, Choirmaster at Grace Died on Tuesday.

By Doug | Published: October 14, 10

I received an email last night saying that Frank Cedric Smith, choirmaster at Grace Church from 1960 to 1992 died on Tuesday at his home in Cape Cod.

It’s given me pause, the email, more so than most of these types of messages. We all stop for a moment at an obituary listing. An obligatory reflection on mortality surfaces, always a bit selfishly because the thought ends up circling back around to our own situation; then we push those “me” thoughts away, and with forced reflection a memory stirs, we move back in time.

Frank Smith made me Head Chorister at Grace in 1974. (My name is up on the wall in the church memorializing my term as “Optimus”) He put the heavy ribboned medallion from Canterbury’s Royal School of Church Music over my head during an induction ceremony on a spring day. This was as had been done previously a hundred or so times, retiring the head chorister before me, investing me with the duty to uphold the musical ministry of the church and the implicit assumption I’d keep the mob of adolescent tussling boys of the choir in line long enough for practices and services to actually occur. No one had ever succeed in doing this before. It was curious why he thought I would be any different. Tradition was important to him.

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My Org-Fu System

By Doug | Published: October 5, 10

I’ve updated the notations I use for note taking during meetings and conversation. Others have named these systems Org-Fu, or Meeting Ninja systems, and they can get elaborate — I assume to overcome the static nature of physical notebooks. Mine is simple and vestigial, the remainder of my days when I used paper notebooks, a lot, and went to meetings, a lot.

All the Org-FU systems rely on a set of codes prepending an information item, or formatting it in a standard way to convey additional meaning to the item noted. The best systems make categories of information stand out, the worst of them need ever present reference cards to make sense of all the glyphs. My system  is mostly a mix of Markdown (MMD) and TaskPaper standards. The list varies in paper format because different graphics stand out.

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