I feel like a broken record sometimes, but for a while now, I have been pretty heavily organization my digital stuff. It’s always been “pretty organized”, but I’ve gotten a bit lax with like, temporary dumps, and changing gears halfway and not quite committing. My latest commitment has been to Joplin. I’ve got… basically all of my writing, over decades, in Joplin now. I have also gone through and added tags to everything. Simple tags, which was the point, but tags.
There is a bit missing. I have a handful of documents, primarily old school documents, that just, lend themselves better to being in Word format than Markdown. But those are a small subset of everything, and I’ll probably move them anyway eventually.
Otherwise, I mean everything.
- I’ve transcribed old journals.
- I’ve downloaded and converted blog posts from Blogger and WordPress and LiveJournal and even fished some out of Archive.org that were “lost”.
- I’ve downloaded all my Usenet posts from an archive on archive,org and pushed them out in Monthly digest notes.
- I have all my old Tweets.
- I have converted old First Choice and NewsMaster files, sometimes manually.
I mean essentially, everything. I also have gone to a fair amount of effort to preserve dates, at least in the post tile.
Everything is sorted down too.
It’s probably not perfect, but it’s the most complete it’s ever been and it’s only going to become more complete.
This roughly mirrors how I was structuring it in raw files in folders. Except now it’s self contained and syncs more easily across all my devices. Everything in the folders, for the most part, is dated too. Like, for example, these 9 entries where I bitch about Glee
I can also get some fun information from the tags. For example, my top tags with over 100 posts are:
- Reviews – 627
- Video Games – 502
- Transformers – 314
- Technology – 262
- Journal – 253
- Politics – 232
- TV – 177
- Toys (which excludes Transformers) – 158
- Second Life – 122
Which feels pretty accurate, though Reviews overlaps in almost every case, so technically Video Games would be the number one most talked about topic. I also excluded a “Misc” tag which has a little over 100 posts that are basically, “sort later”.
Digging a bit more, I have written about my job in some form 96 times, Programming 59 times, Music 69 times, Marvel 77 times.
Not everything gets posted of course, and some stuff was posted long ago, somewhere, but not anymore. Generally speaking, when I say “wrote about” it also means anywhere from 500-100 and beyond words ont he subject. I was hoping there was a good word counting plug in for Joplin but there does not seem to be one. I can (and do) back it up as a dump of Markdown files, so I may build a Python Script to give me some word-count statistics.
Some other fun statistics, I write between 700 and 900 posts each decade, Probably a bit more if you include all the social media and Reddit posts out there, though I do compile some of those in as “Journal Entries” when they get long enough. Basically, 100 posts per year, 2 posts a week feels about right, on average. I say “posts” but it’s not necessarily posts, it’s more, entries, articles, thought blobs, whatever you want to call them.
I also have stuff that is not mine in here as well (only my writing gets tags), in a separate category. I clip news articles an such to Markdown either through a script that pulls from favorites articles in my RSS reader, or through a web clipper that puts everything into a private GitHub repository, which I can pull in and sort down quickly.
There are also numerous lists I’ve collected up, often from different old one Note files. Media to watch or read or play, things to do.
I have notes on coding projects and command line commands.
It’s all here, in this nice, neat, searchable notebook.
Why Joplin. Because I tried Obsidian and hated it. Well, not really. One, it’s free. There is a paid back-end you can use, but instead I use a plug in to sync through OneDrive, though I could use other services. It also encrypts everything. I had everything in raw Markdown files, synced through OneDrive. Except with AI ruining everything, I want all my shit encrypted and private. Also, One Drive, does not work on Linux, so syncing was a pain. It’s also harder to get to things on my phone using raw file syncing. Joplin has a phone app.
Basically, and it’s most crucial, I can sync, between Linux on my Laptop, the App on my phone, and Windows on my Desktop. My workflow these days involves writing notes and ideas and whatever on my phone more than anywhere else. I was resistant at first but after giving in it’s what i use the most, because it’s what I have. Also, frankly, I have a hard time actually typing long form on my clicky clacky desktop mechanical keyboard. I do type on my laptop a fair amount, it’s just not convenient because I do not like typing, on my lap. I need a table, a surface.
