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MyInfo Is My Choice
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Posted by Amontillado
Jan 25, 2025 at 04:39 PM
Very timely discussion.
I’m writing a self help book on how to get out of debt. A thoroughly cheerless topic, but one I had to deal with. I’m now debt free with a credit rating as high as my golf handicap. Anyone who’s seen me golf should be quite impressed.
Anyway, there I was this week, 30,000 words or so into making as much comedy as possible out of tragedy, when I realized how far I’d strayed from my outline. Some good came from spontaneity. I decided to back propagate my prose into my outline, gaining a better start to finish plan than I started with.
The idea of a Zettelkasten came to mind. I went through my work paragraph by paragraph and created very short notes for each concept. I did this in Devonthink.
Next come notes for chapters. In these notes I don’t spell out details of what I’m going to write, I write a high level overview. Details come from transcluding appropriate idea notes.
For instance, if I talk about bad Tik Tok advice, I might transclude a note about velocity banking. In a later chapter I might go into more details where that same note would be transcluded. In either chapter, I can refine my velocity banking details. That updates my notes for both chapters.
A chapter note is used in side-by-side view, showing both the source and rendered Markdown. I’ve always thought the need for dual view to be a terrible limitation of Markdown. In this case it’s working.
The rendered view produces all the transclusions. The source view lets me follow transcluded links, optionally in new tabs. I get a workspace where I can edit the chapter notes, follow links to component topics, and see the aggregate product at the same time. Nice.
True rigor demands faith to the elegance of CRIMP methodology, so I fired up TheArchive, a modern revival of nvAlt. For any modern PKM enthusiast, TheArchive is too plain - but I found for this use, it matches Devonthink. Notion was workable, but not convenient. Obsidian was fine for this purpose without any community plugins.
My chapter notes were streamed from TheArchive to Marked for my compiled view, I can follow links (searches, actually) to component topics, and the magic of transclusion gave me the consistent notes across chapters I like.
I’m going back to Devonthink to finish this - but TheArchive was surprisingly effective and a whole lot cheaper.
Old isn’t bad or limited. In 1970, the Gougeon brothers built the trimaran Adagio. It’s known as the first sailboat built entirely without fasteners. It was devastatingly competitive in the world’s longest freshwater regatta, the Chicago to Mackinac race. At 30 years old in 2000, Adagio became the first sailboat to win both the Chicago to Mackinac and Bayview to Mackinac races, a feat she duplicated in 2016 at 46 years on the water, keeping pace with boats twice her waterline.
Age is a poor measure of efficiency.
Posted by Lucas
Jan 25, 2025 at 06:52 PM
Graham Rhind wrote:
>
>ConnectedText finally gave up working on my hardware last week,
>
I realize this is a MyInfo thread, but I’m curious what happened. When I saw your post, I tried installing (from Softpedia) and running ConnectedText on my current machine and didn’t have any issues.
Posted by Graham Rhind
Jan 25, 2025 at 07:29 PM
Lucas wrote:
>
>Graham Rhind wrote:
>>
>>ConnectedText finally gave up working on my hardware last week,
>>
>
>
>I realize this is a MyInfo thread, but I’m curious what happened. When I
>saw your post, I tried installing (from Softpedia) and running
>ConnectedText on my current machine and didn’t have any issues.
After a major Windows update last week CT failed to start with Access Violation memory errors. I think this is a combination of a Microsoft Surface machine (using solid state memory) and the Windows update - it had previously thrown up some errors and I’d had to reinstall it a few times. I’m aware that I could probably run CT on a different machine, but I can’t afford to upgrade at the moment. In any case, I was getting nervous of having anything major still in software which (unfortunately) has been so thoroughly abandoned, so took the chance to move the final project out of it.
Posted by Tumbleweed
Jan 26, 2025 at 02:50 PM
I agree about MyInfo 100! It’s as though RightNote and UltraRecall has a baby and added great features from InfoQube to boot.
Everyone knows about the inline columns, which are brilliant, but there are a few features that are really impressive:
- Panes for Backlinks, Tags, Attributes, Revisions, Global Search, and Note Structure
- Note Structure, essentially an outline view for longer docs - extremely useful!
- Attributes, forms and templates are VERY easy and fast to create!
- Extremely customizable
MyInfo is my “all-in-one” data aggregator and used for notes, project management, todos, files and work done, contacts and CRM, meeting/call/email tracker, subject notes, PDF viewer, research hub, etc. Just add emClient or Outlook/NeoPro and you’re set for nearly everything!
The Perspectives is his solution to “Saved Search”, “Filters”, etc. It is a bit clunky, but also powerful. I use it as a lightweight CRM, so I simply make each meeting/call/email tagged with @person and @company. Then one can have a filter for view of leads-company-etc. I understand the desire to improve these, but as for me, I just try to live with them as they are and learn how to optimize them for my use cases.
I add email as a note type, where I specify the title, etc and then drag in the email as an attachment (I click “Insert Attachment” and drag from emClient/Outlook and it copies to the MyInfo_external_files dir automatically). Processing important email this way takes a few seconds, but is much more powerful than importing with some generic title (“RE: meeting tomorrow”) that is not informative, or losing email in your 100 messages per day.
For the Zetttelkasten, having an tree structure of topics/data (with copies if needed), and revisiting your data periodically to make outlines of various subjects is much better than the in vogue “no placement” methods that then result in giant results of non-ordered data - you have to make some sense of it anyway.
A few improvements could be useful:
1) The backlinks could be improved by having some columns in it, like date. Then perspectives for each contact in a CRM would not be needed.
2) Drag file in as attachment for those types (like email) where you would not like it to render or be a new attachment item.
3) Cloned items do not maintain children, only the note in question.
4) Petko doesn’t respond to email and suggestions very promptly.
All in all, it is the best tool I have found and my daily data entry program, although I do still suffer from CRIMP as do we all.
Posted by Steve
Jan 26, 2025 at 04:40 PM
The Journal https://www.davidrm.com/support/glossary/ has a couple of ways to tag, even down to single word level.
Graham Rhind wrote:
Daly de Gagne wrote:
>
>thought up front, and only Tana (as far as I know) allows tagging at
>paragraph level, so in those programs you would have to have one item
>per note/page and tag each one, which is not ideal.
>
>Graham