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Open Source Personal

Notepad Killer

I’m a pretty pathetic note taker. I’m not great at it, my note management skills aren’t that great, and I take a lot of notes during the day. My computer’s desktop is littered with notepad files all the time. Just ordered and unordered lists of things to do, snippets of code, URLs and other details. It’s a giant mess. I’ve tried various products to organize it, and nothing has worked. It doesn’t really hurt me, but it does drive me nuts. There’s got to be a cleaner way to do this.

Since I have a webserver on my computer at all times, I decided to just install media wiki (the software that powers wikipedia.org among other sites) as my new notepad. So far this idea is working rather well. Everything is in one place, off my desktop, and pretty organized. Thanks to being in a wiki, I can link things all over the place rather easy.

I’ve never been fond of the wiki syntax, personally I find it a bit awkward, but I guess I’ll get used to it in time.

I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone but a handful of people. For me at least, it seems to be working rather well. Much nicer than a bunch of notepad files littering my desktop… now if only I can manage to get rid of all that other junk.

I’ll try and post in a few weeks how I feel this serves as a solution to my problem. I have a feeling this will work very well. It’s organized, and in the web format I’m most comfortable with.

3 replies on “Notepad Killer”

I came up with the same solution myself. It didn’t work. I now have several wiki installations. One each on on my Web host, my laptop, my machine in college, and my home desktop. I have one of another type (not Mediawiki) on a server in college, used by a group of people. I have two of those little single-HTML-page wikis, but I can’t remember what machine’s they’re on. I still have a whole bunch of text files, most of them todo lists.

I also leave notes to myself by emailing them to one of my email accounts (Gmail or my own domain) or by saving them in my SMS outbox, or as notes on my phone. And my desks (home and college) have paper all over them. Finally, for things that I can’t afford to miss, I use post-it notes widgets on my laptop (OS X) and college desktop (Gnome).

I guess the point is that there’s a good chance you’ve just added to the number of ways you keep data, rather than solidifying it into one unified method.

Rory, get yourself a Palm. Seriously, it was the best decision I ever made. Go with a Tungsten E2 and you don’t have to pay more than $200. Since I bought my Tungsten E two years ago, I feel so much more free, I didn’t loose an important note since or missed a meeting. Everything is always at the same place and it’s so easy to just grab into your pocket, push a button and start writing. It’s a lot easier than using a PC for sure, but you can still use one and sync it with your Palm, it just takes one click. I may sound like a Palm fanboy, but it really is great, the only thing I’m missing is sound recording, but you can have that with the Tungsten T, I’m using my mobile for that. You may also use a Pocket PC, but I don’t know much about them, since I’m a happy Palm user.

Another me too for a Palm. Well worth the couple/few hundreds. PPC I have no experience in and don’t care to have either… I still have a strictly work todo list with Task coach http://members.chello.nl/f.niessink/index.html which is not perfect but small & well done.

If Mozilla extension Quicknote had possibility to use remote files or syncing it would be my first choice for computer based todolist.

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