From the Prime newsletter:

As someone who finds it near-impossible to just choose one place to store my ideas and files, I tend to have my data spread over many places: Evernote, Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, locally on my Mac, other siloed apps. And often I just can’t remember where I put something (digitally, at least–my keys are always with my wallet).

So I decided to keep a “where” file. I have a markdown file that lives on one of my password-protected subdomains so that I can view it on the web. (I am using Fastmail to store my file, and I use markdeep to automatically render the markdown file into HTML.)

Each area of concern has its own subheader, followed by bullet points containing locations of various pieces of data. A simple example: sometimes I tag an article about cholesterol in Pinboard, and other times I webclip a selection into Evernote or just journal about that aspect of my health into Evernote, and tag the entry with cholesterol. As far as I know, this is a comprehensive list of any place on the web where I would have documented or saved articles about the topic. I may not necessarily remember if I clipped an article to Evernote or just saved it to Pinboard, but I can be confident that these are the only two places where I would find stuff about cholesterol.

Depending on the topic, sometimes I include the URL of an email folder in Fastmail, or the path to a directory on my Mac. If I know the location of a specific file that I will frequent, I will note it as such–e.g., “xyz.opml lives at ~/Dropbox/Outliner.”

It’s far from a perfect system. For brain dumps, I fluctuate between Drafts for iOS, Evernote, and Apple’s Notes app. God knows where I would have entered any specific piece of information, and I don’t expect Siri to reliably find it for me. Sometimes I don’t even know the search query I would use; I may just be thinking, “I know so-and-so told me the name of a band.” But for the important stuff, I find my “where” file to make my life easier.

What’s your system?

Not User-Friendly

When I downloaded and opened the iOS app, first thing I was presented with was “Server.” I had to ask on Twitter and was told to enter https://app.wallabag.it.

Then I had to enter a Client ID and Client Secret, which means I had to create a new client. After I got my keys, I entered them into the app, and after logging in, I was finally able to use the app.

I understand the reasoning for above. Wallabag is an open-source app that was designed to be self-hosted, so obviously most users will be entering their own servers. Designing a separate app for users paying for the hosted solution is not cost-efficient. However, if someone is not savvy enough to install Wallabag on his/her own server, what makes one think he/she will be comfortable generating app tokens?

Same issue for the Chrome extension. I thought if I was logged into the app in Chrome that would be sufficient, but after bookmarking a few articles and not seeing them in my list, I went into the options and saw I needed to once again enter my Client ID and Client Secret, as well as my login credentials.

Accessibility

There are no settings in the iOS app to adjust the text size, and it does not support Dynamic Type. Frankly, I find the default text size a strain to read.

Conclusion

It appears that the annual fee for a one-year subscription on wallabag.it is about 15 US dollars. I would be more than happy to pay for a web service. However, even with the hosted solution, this is not user-friendly out of the box, and it does not make for a pleasant reading experience. As much as I value paying for my apps and owning my data, I’m gonna stick with Pocket.

So for now I’m sticking with Pocket. It’s user-friendly and has iOS and Chrome extensions, so it’s really easy to add an article to my reading list. (And if you’re a Workflow user and upset that Apple removed Pocket support, you can add these workflows using the Pocket API).

I’m not thrilled about using Pocket, because (a) they are tracking everything I save to their service; (b) who the f knows what Mozilla is going to do with it? Privacy concerns and impermanence, two constants of the web.

The first one simply lets you add a _note attribute to a node via a dialog box. It also adds a icon (Little Outliner supports Font Awesome!).

add note
    dialog.ask ("Insert note", "", "", function (name) {
        op.attributes.setOne ("_note", name);
        op.attributes.setOne ("icon", "fa fa-comment-o");
        });

The second shows the note in an alert .

show note
    t = op.attributes.getOne ("_note");
    dialog.alert (t);

The last one is fairly complicated. I remember spending many hours trying to write this for Fargo. It will go through every node in an outline (however deeply nested) and if a node has a note, the icon will show next to it so that you know which nodes have notes.

add icon to notes
    function actionHere () {
        note = op.attributes.getOne ("_note");
        if (note) {
            op.attributes.setOne ("icon", "fa fa-comment-o");
            }
        }
    var ctheads = 0;
    op.visitAll (function (headline) {
        ctheads++;
        });
    ctheads = ctheads - 1;
    op.firstSummit ();
    for (var i = 0; i<ctheads; i++) {
        actionHere ();
        if (op.hasSubs ()) {
            op.go (right, 1);
            }
            else if (!op.go (down, 1)) {
            op.go (up, infinity);
            op.go (left, 1);
            while (!op.go (down, 1)) {
                op.go (left, 1);
                }
            }
        }
    actionHere ();

Read Dave Winer’s announcement.

I did a massive amount of scripting for Fargo. In fact, Fargo’s scripting abilities motivated me to learn Javascript; I owe a debt of gratitude to Dave for inspiring me to learn a new language just so that I could expand on his outlining software. I have yet to test the menubar in Little Outliner other than a simple dialog alert, but I am looking forward to importing some of my Fargo scripts to see what still works.

You scan scour my old Fargo-run blog to see what I wrote back then about scripting.