[PLUG] organizing notes

[Bill Thoen]

On Thu, 16 Sep 2004, Dan Young wrote:

> On Thu, 2004-09-16 at 12:09, Josh Orchard wrote:
> > 
> > What I'm trying to come up with is a way to sort and organize those
> > notes.  I would like to make them a DB and web base accessed.
> 
> Sounds like a wiki.

A wiki is a pretty good idea for this, but you'd have to control who has
access to it and it depends on PHP scripts and a DBMS. It may be worth
asking yourself, for your own personal notes, do you really need all that
horsepower? And how much effort do you want to expend maintaining it 
(think upgrades on all the technology that a wiki depends on)?

In the old days, sea captains and scientists kept logs or notebooks, and 
documented their work in chronological order. We still have many of 
these notes today, and they are still accessable to the naked eye. I used 
to use Word star, but those notes are long gone, dust in the wind.

Today, we can do the same with text files and better yet, we have tools
like grep. Plain text documents never go out of fashion like so many
exotic digital formats (word star, Word .doc, TeX, html, XML, etc.) Keep
them online and access via SSH, and you've got what you need. Text is easy
to migrate into the future digital media, easy to print, and with a little
discipline in how you structure your entries, you can also run it through
awk and/or sed and reformat into other formats or create indexes.

Text is the best.

- Bill Thoen