After years of working... how do you keep track of your small tips and manuals of things you already done?

Daniel Pfeffer

OriginalGriff wrote:

"nut cult leader"?

I think the approved term these days is "influencer".

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.

OriginalGriff

Don't care! I want my groupies! :laugh:

"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!

Chris C B

I love OneNote to death - but the not the free one. For years I have been trying to get a decent cataloguing system for my thousands of classical CDs, but nothing hit the spot, until I bit the bullet and scanned all the boxes back and front and then did an 'OCR all image text' on them. Now I can search and pull any CD* I want as the image name is the drawer, rack and position in the rack. *I really should amend that to say 'any CD that I can still remember I've got'. :-O :laugh:

DRHuff

Groupies? From the cast here at the Lounge? I don’t think you have thought this one through all the way!

If you can't laugh at yourself - ask me and I will do it for you.

David ONeil

I made up an Access DB for holding that type of information. Works nice for my needs, but would have to rework the design a bit to hold the filename for any local PDFs, since that hasn't been a consideration till now.

Our Forgotten Astronomy | Object Oriented Programming with C++

Mike Hankey

The free versions not too bad. I've not completely converted to it yet but will eventually. If they sold OneNote separately, and not subscription I would probably purchase it.

The less you need, the more you have. Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally. JaxCoder.com

ElectronProgrammer

I used to store them as text files in a folder but recently I have been converting them to Joplin[^] just because it integrates with Nextcloud (I have my own private server). They are still text but are in markdown format so I can format the text and add (external) images and other documents. Also, Joplin has a web clipper (at least for firefox) which is very handy.

Mycroft Holmes

OriginalGriff wrote:

but have you considered posting them as Tips here

I started doing that when it first became available but my one - two liners were criticized as being too small/simplistic, T&T seems to have devolved into a mini article suppository.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity - RAH I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP

GuyThiebaut

I keep a separate folder for every distinct piece of work I do. The folder is usually named with the reference number/string of the piece of work and a short description. In the folder goes any useful information and there is also present a notes.txt file holding information as I am doing the work. I then make extensive use of Agent Ransack on these folders to find information(Agent Ransack is the bees knees for searching for and within files). I also have a massive sql.txt file that holds every sql single query I have every found to be useful(and comes in handy a lot). I am not keen relying on OneNote or any online/database solution as plain text files do not rely on an underlying piece of software that may become superseded or break. I did once, in a previous job, write an Access DB app to hold this information and make it easy to search and categorise but I now prefer plain text files.

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”

― Christopher Hitchens

Derek Hunter

A Wiki is the way to do it. The key parts of our are: 1) A daily diary. 2) A page for each project (currently '1047'). 3) A 'HowTo' section. 4) A page for each application or language we use, e.g. Python, git etc.

Clumpco

Have you considered setting up a Nextcloud[^] server? I have one running in a VM that spends its time indexing my photos and sharing albums with the family. There is a fulltext search add-on which should do just the job. No need to move your files from the NAS into NextCloud, you can add drives and folders as "external" sources. Note that NextCloud has its own "Notes" add-on and also a very handy browser bookmark manager.

So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8

CrankyGit

Interesting! How do you find the accuracy of OneNote's OCR?

pkfox

I've created a .NET Core Web site which I host locally on a Linux box, it's massively over engineered ( largely because I'm semi retired) having a Postgresql backend accessed via an API. It started off life as somewhere to store the syntax of Linux commands that I don't use very often but has grown into my general purpose diary and todo app, it even has a section used for the CCC where i record clues , the setter and solver, the solution and the time it was posted and solved.

"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP

Kate X257

Microsoft Sticky Notes. All notes are labeled by type, quarter and year. I've tried every major note keeping tool in existence, paper trails, and even diction software, but in the end a giant bag of non-hierarchical notes which are easily searchable trumps everything in terms of both maintenance, scalability and has a low barrier-to-entry. I can search and read notes on my computer, on my phone, or any browser. There's rudimentary support for color codes and markup. There's no overall structure to maintain. What else do you need?

Chris C B

For my purposes, 'good enough'. With the front and the back scanned and OCRed, I have yet to have a search failure. If the front of the CD case is in a fancy script the results are poor, but invariably the normal lettering on the back is very accurate in most cases.

Bumchuckle

Me: "Honey, I joined a cult and didn't know it!" Lounge: "One of us, One of us, One of us..." As for the OP question: Text file in cloud storage (Dropbox) as per my Cult leader, and I bookmark any useful web pages so that I know they helped when I inevitably google the problem again (and again etc. ;-))

darktrick544

I have a subdir named Code Snippets in my Projects dir, where all my projects code resides. Every time I do something that strikes me as "something I'm going to need to do again but won't remember how I did it" gets the code snippet saved in there with an indicative title. Been doing this for my entire career (30+ years). Add to it and browse it couple times a week. Getting to the time where I'm thinking of who to pass it down to.

CosmoSpacely

I can definitely recommend mediawiki. It may be overkill for a lone developer, but for any size team it works well. It's simple enough to manage and it provides a decent search. Authoring is easy enough, just follow the cheatsheet. Our team has used it for over almost 15 years. Our corporate IT overlords have replaced it with Confluence, which sucks in comparison. Simplicity rules! Cosmo Jetson! You're Fiiiiired!

DumpsterJuice

I use "Agent ransack". At some point, no matter how hard you try to structure things, it gets a way from you. Agent Ransack is essentially a Grep Tool, that is amazingly fast. It's almost as fast as google itself. It's got a (Right mouse click) Context. My Projects vary the whole landscape of technologies, from strait up.NET projects, Documents, Angular, Documentation, notes, tips. Agent Ransack solves this problem: "I know I have this somewhere, but I forget where it is" Keep It Simple, keep it moving.

Member 9167057

That depends on the manual in question. If we're talking about the documentation of a third-party library I'm using, I put it in my repository. For tips, I don't keep track of them at all once I've implemented them in my code & understood them. If I ever need a link to give someone, I search.