For projects, notes in various categories go into the flat text files README, TODO, BUGS, or QUIRKS (or go into the main documentation structure in other ways), and get version-controlled along with the code.

For things that interest me, I have a few different things that overlap each other.

My first stop, for ultra-short-term I-want-to-look-at-this-tomorrow stuff, I just leave a tab open in my browser (Firefox). Once the tab has been open for a little while and I keep going back to look at it, it earns a bookmark in my bookmark folder heirarchy. Once a bookmark folder starts to grow to an unwieldy size, it gets looked at to see what stuff is more value as a long-term reference, and what is actually something I'm blipping to regularly, and what really should be deleted. Anything that's a long-term reference in that point gets moved to a private MediaWiki. I have several MediaWikis installed side-by-side on my server, a couple of which are actually public, and they cover different broad topics. Each one has a heirarchy roughly matching my bookmark heirarchy.

On top of that, for things that are useful or interesting enough that I would be disturbed if the link vanished on me, I have a private mirror heirarchy (two actually, one for text files and one for HTML, but the text is almost entirely old Usenet clippings). For HTML pages of value, the bottom leaf of the directory tree is always a directory with the naming scheme date-title-location, and then I use the following command to mirror a page locally into it, complete with everything needed to display: 

#!/bin/sh
# Mirrors URLs given as arguments non-recursively but
# including all items needed to display, replacing %20 in the name
# with " " and appending ".html" to any items with no extension
#
# Use to mirror a small number of associated pages in one place

/usr/bin/pavuk -singlepage -store_name index.html -norobots -auto_refe
+rer \
    -fnrules F \
    '*' \
    '(sc (ts %b "%20" " ") (sc "." (sif (seq %e "") "html" %e)))' \
    "$@"

[download]

I can then browse through that directory tree, and when I click on the final entry, the page just pops up for viewing. The wiki gets updated with a "(local)" link next to the entry text.

In reply to Re: how do you organize your notes? by AZed
in thread how do you organize your notes? by Anonymous Monk

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