Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

Re:Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge? by kepano on Saturday September 01, 2018 @02:20PM (#17893217)

I went down a deep rabbit hole on this about a year ago. Nothing feels totally right but currently I use a mix of TiddlyWiki and Airtable. I haven't found a great solution for media outside of Dropbox but those two tools work well for text and data.

TiddlyWiki is rather inscrutable at first, but extremely customizable and very thoughtfully architected. What I like most is that it is doesn't rely on an internet connection, it's very customizable and non-linear. The basic idea of being able to interlink things and create new pages just by adding brackets around a word is something I miss anywhere I don't have it.

I use TiddlyWiki in an Electron wrapper made with Nativefier. With a bit of custom CSS the interface is very pleasant.

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Re:Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge? by justinnhli on Saturday September 01, 2018 @05:55PM (#17894083)

Can you say more about how you use Airtable? To me Airtable has a really appealing low/zero startup cost, but then I'm always tripped up by not being able to do arbitrary queries, joins, etc. to create new views.

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Re:Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge? by kepano on Saturday September 01, 2018 @07:49PM (#17894536)

I use Airtable for "quantified self" type things like logging workouts and health metrics, also tracking reviews of books and movies, planning travel, and anything that I would otherwise use spreadsheets for.

By the way, you can do simple joins in Airtable by using the "lookup" and "rollup" field types, but I agree that it is relatively limited in that respect.

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Re:Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge? by bfirsh on Saturday September 01, 2018 @11:09PM (#17895323)

I use Airtable for this stuff too. Unfortunately it doesn’t work offline (not even reads!) so I’m very close to reverting back to spreadsheets.

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