Notes

I have been looking at tools for taking notes and using quite a few for different purposes.
Archiving emails, bookmarks are pretty basic and common but they were lacking for many reasons.
Since a lot of the interesting stuff I come across is on the web, Scrapbook and Zotero were to pretty natural extensions of bookmarks. I tend to prefer Zotero and my only gripe is that it parses the html of the pages I load which is slowing me down when accessing big source files through opengrok .

For more local notes I have used:

• a local wiki with a server (notably MoinMoin which is pretty nice and in Python so it's easy to fix the rare problems)
• Tiddlywiki which is a self contained HTML/Javascript page and can show several little pages simultaneously (tiddlers)
• Freemind which is a Java mindmapping tool that shows pretty trees, can fold them easily and allows for quick keyboard only edition

This blog is an additional level of technical notes for things that are quite general, non controversial and that I would gladly share with anybody who cares to read it.

Now, this description might seem a bit vague but I feel that it corresponds to a purpose that is not well served by my other note taking tools. This blog being public, it's clear it only contains stuff that can be shared freely, which means I can copy anything from it, access it anywhere without concern of security etc.

The relative privacy of my other note taking tools means that I don't have to sort between public stuff and more private one. As a result they contain a mix of information with different publication/security constraints. This makes it difficult to decide where I can keep copies, where I can access the copies etc. In that respect the added value of the blog is quite clear, so let's see if it works...