Software Request: Open Source Personal Content Repository

Posted by Donovan
Sep 21, 2018 at 07:05 AM

I think solutions for the entire concept described in the original post by ‘thought’ is probably becoming needed far more than simple outliners. We live in a world of mixed-media, and the need for instant access, far more than many of us simply need to file away writing in their proper tree structure (or whatever). Bringing together all of this content under one piece of software is probably not going to ever be a solution because of the enormity of the project. Because of this, I think we should be looking to regular file/folder structures in our preferred operating system and simply find a pleasant-to-look-at “front-end” that would serve as the Google of our local content - whatever digital content that might be.

Think about the internet and how it is organized. Right, it’s not. Some things for some content certainly are (Wikipedia springs to mind), but on the whole it’s just “out there.” It didn’t take long to discover that Yahoo’s Directory of the World Wide Web was a mess and what was needed was what is still the “front-end” of the web today—Google.com. We simply search and find (usually). But, we can bring intelligent naming, tagging, etc. to the locally stored content and bring some sense of order and near certainty that the front end search will being it up in milliseconds.

I like Schmid’s Notebooks maybe for the simple reason that it relies on the regular file system and brings things in a pleasant fashion to the notebook.

The original post described a need we see more and more.

Think on this:

- All content in regular files and folders
- Intelligently named for easy searching
- Super-tagging or meta-names
- Anybody who has used the free search program “Everything’ knows how fast that local content, of all kinds, can be cataloged and pulled up - as you type! ( https://www.voidtools.com ) Amazing software.
- Maybe there is a gleam of a solution that is as simple as utilizing our preferred tools to create our content, while using a lightning fast front-end (like ‘Everything’) to find and retrieve ALL of our content.
- Maybe changing the mindset from trying to finely tune the organization of our content in Yahoo-like directories of old, to a Google for our own stuff.

I know the above doesn’t address every issue described in the OP. What it *could* do is get us thinking about a change of mindset and think about how we can work within a search system (and allow for tabbed searching to bring up multiple pieces of content) while being able to connect one piece of local mixed-media content to the other. It may sound half-baked because, well, it is. But, I leave it here as food for thought. In other words, it’s an idea to a problem, it seems more and more of us are having, which is how we retrieve all of the mixed-media content we collect from simple text files, to images, HTML, video, presentations, on and on, without it all being in some proprietary enormous database. Not a “Room of our Own” but a “Google of our Own.”