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bolido_sentimental  2yr ago (text post)   3864 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 25, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

Posted because I didn't see Zorba post one today. Feel free to delete if that's an issue.

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I sometimes see people ask here for some old blogpost or comments they have read and cannot find - and someone usually answers. There is obviously a certain advantage of asking a group of people - only one needs to remember and it seems that the group remembers. But I feel like some organization and order would help me personally to find stuff I already "know". Does anyone here have some good system/workflow for saving great content from here or some blogs?

I would like to use it as some form of "extended memory". Essentially I want something where I have link to the original, its title and a few words through which I can find it (for example ctrl+f) - could be a short description and/or some tags. And some excerpt (or ideally archive of the content). It should hopefully also last for a long time (and thus be sufficiently scalable)

Previously I have used browser bookmarks, Obsidian (basically a few markdown files) and just pasting the links in private discord channel. Bookmarks are not quite scalable and not that well searchable. Obsidian is probably closest to what I am looking for but only searching tens of files is timeconsuming.

Right now I am thinking of using some kind of txt file. Longevity guaranteed, ctrl+f for searchability. With some simple version of csv so it can be navigated by scripts. Do you have some cool strategy for keeping you reading list? Or do you just rely on your memory?

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. Most of which I had not thought of. But I found out I am too busy IRL to try the cool sounding suggestions like custom sqlite database or perosnal wiki. I will try Mendeley/Zotero/Pocket to see if like it. Also good point on browser history being quite useful. But I do not have it synchronised acroos mutliple devices. I should at least try to back it up.

Have you considered searching your browser history?

Another option would be just a full text searchable (instant search, like the google searchbox or https://hn.algolia.com) archive of every article you've ever read. Technologically very doable, and there are implementations on github but idk how well done or useful they are

It's definitely not worth the time to manually maintain a list, you don't really know beforehand when yo'll need an article in the future, and it'd take a solid minute or two to copy that all in, which would really add up if you read tens of thousands of articles. (and if you only save the "most important ones", you probably aren't gonna save the one you need in a few months)

If I read something and really like it, I save it to Pocket. Works well for finding it back.

At some point is it worth simply running your own sqlite database? You could make a lightweight front-end if you wanted and customize it to your exact specs.

I feel like reference managers, such as Mendeley or Zotero, work well for this type of purpose. They are built to be a small database and thus search fast for reasonable sizes you are not likely to surpass. They have good browser integrations that make it about as easy as bookmarking to save things. They have tags / non-tree "file" structure interface. They can search within most text / pdf documents, and they have fields for annotations, comments etc. A neat feature is that you can add "related items" to any item, making it easy to store explicit connections for later. They also have cloud-based backup / storage, and If I recall correctly at lest with Zotero you can set up your own server if you want.

The only thing they wouldn't fulfill from your desiderata are being CSV-like, I guess, though I think they have some way of exporting everything into text format. (And I don't think this would be needed in any case, built in search and features are pretty good.)

You could use a memoranda email box for this. Free cloud mailbox providers like Google or Microsoft will let you create a free mailbox with at least a couple of gigabytes of storage, to which address you can send or share things to remember. You can create automatic sorting rules or filter views to process based on keywords or search terms, file attachments are supported (and often indexed), and they are designed to be quickly and easily searched, and you can easily forward things to others as needed.

I use bookmarks sequestered down into different bookmark folders. I don't really save so much that I would need a keyword search system for it, given that I am generally of the philosophy that the internet should be searched, not indexed, but the death of the search machine with all competitors becoming worse in a race to the bottom certainly makes some degree of archival more attractive.

A private wiki would be the nonplusultra for that, but the work required to build one never exceeded the use I would get from it for me yet.

but the work required to build one

surely there's a website somewhere you can just pay $5/mo to do this for you? If you don't mind it being public, miraheze is free iirc

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