Huh. Yeah that title isn’t very descriptive. Anywho, I’ve done this about 4 times in the past year alone but I’m changing up my approach to knowledge management and storage. Again.
So I settled on Obsidian and Bookstack last time. Obsidian for notes and Bookstack for storage/wiki type knowledge. Ultimately though neither of these was “perfect”. I’m still coming to terms with the distinct possibility that maybe nothing will be “perfect”. Once I come to terms with that, maybe everything will just fall into place, but for the time being, it’s time to shake things up again.
So, what’re we moving to now? Notion. Yep. Good ole Notion. Used it before, liked it, left it, still unsure why I left it, but here we are.
“But Kale, Notion is always online so your data is inaccessible offline” Eh? I have mobile data. Non-issue. There’s also an offline mode, which I discovered while writing this, so there’s that too.
“But Kale, you don’t own your data. It’s just stored on someone else’s computer!” Yawn. Yes, but also, no. I won’t be elaborating.
“But Kale Notion isn’t open source, aren’t you a proponent of FOSS?” Yes, but Obsidian isn’t either and the FOSS community loves it. I’m a proponent of FOSS but I’m also a realist and realize that sometimes there’s just not a good option for what I want in the FOSS community. Trust me, I’d LOVE to find the “perfect” FOSS solution (cough it’s Emacs cough) but I just don’t really feel like tinkering with something at the moment, I just want it to work out of the box (cough this is why not Emacs - right now cough).
Anywho, self arguments aside, Notion still ticks pretty much every box I needed ticked, so it’ll be my main area for dashboarding, todo-listing, etc. I’ve still got a whole separate aspect that needs addressing: wiki knowledge.
So, I think of “wiki knowledge” as things like guides, how-to’s, etc. Stuff that I guess could go in Notion, but won’t. Instead I’ll be using Gitea for that. Long ago in a galaxy far far away I spearheaded the implementation of a wiki in a repo at work, and I personally think it’s great. I just never thought of doing that at home for some reason. But that’s where we’re at now. It makes for an incredibly easy, but still versatile, way of storing and accessing knowledge. Your files are in folders, however many layers deep you desire, and are written in Markdown (which we all know I consider the only way to write anything), so they’re lightweight and readable everywhere. It’s “perfect”.
“But Kale what if you need to access information while away?” Eh I honestly probably won’t need to access information that is primarily about how to do/setup/fix things in my home network while away from my home network. So non-issue. If I ever do, I can implement ways into the network. Or I can have a copy of the repo on my NAS and then I’ll have access everywhere. Might explore that one day.
But yeah, that’s where we’re at with all of that. Wow this post was wordy. Uh yeah so that’s that.