philwilson.org

My wiki is a ghetto

16 June, 2008

Because it’s on the web so I never go there to actually look for stuff, and it’s not built into my normal search

Where’s the “search my shit” button that searches delicious and twitter and flickr and my wiki and my IM conversations for that one link I added or sent three months ago?

Practically, the reason Tomboy is so useful is because it’s so local. Local to my PC and local to my brain because it comes up with a simple key-combo and lets me either start typing, searching or opening notes. It’s the shizzle. Which is why it going cross-platform for 0.12 is awesome.

What do I do in the meantime? I really like the look and feel of Tudumo but I don’t really need a GTD app, my GTD is sorted by index cards, I just need somewhere to dump notes every now and again before my brain explodes.

It seems vaguely ironic, although possibly in an Alanis Morissette way, that as people become happier to use and more reliant on using the cloud (including me), my demands on my local applications have gone way, way up.

That is to say, the value of the cloud to me is the network (that is to say, the people), plus it has some vaguely nice tools, but where all that data is most useful to me is on my local PC.

See other posts tagged with general search wiki and all posts made in June 2008.

Comments

Gareth
17 June, 2008 at 02:56

maybe what you need is site specific browsers for your cloud apps.

Mathew
17 June, 2008 at 09:50

What’s GTD？

Maybe you need to log every keystroke?

alf
17 June, 2008 at 10:14

I’m a little surprised that desktop search tools like Google Desktop, Spotlight and Tracker don’t have plugins for searching remote sites – maybe it would slow down the results too much.

On the other hand, if all your sites support OpenSearch it should be straightforward to build a metasearch page.

What about mirroring your del.icio.us, Flickr, twitter, etc items locally so that they can be indexed like any other files?

Richard
18 June, 2008 at 16:07

Thanks for the Tudumo L&F plug, Phil.

Have you tried Evernote? I use it for general “stuff”.

Phil
20 June, 2008 at 09:58

Thanks for the tip, Richard, I’ll give it a try, although I generally dislike services where I have to sign up to an account just to use the desktop software.

FWIW I like Tudumo very much, not just the L&F. It’s a very well-put-together application.

Rob Russell
27 June, 2008 at 14:27

I just got on the GTD bandwagon a few months ago. Working out great so far. Tudumo looks cool but I’m a Linux guy.

The real reason for my comment is that I think you’ve inspired a term that should exist: “morissettic” which would mean ironic, although possibly in an Alanis Morissette way. It’s going in my dictionary.