Slashdot Mirror
How Do You Organize Your Data?
kpellegr asks: "After returning from a well deserved holiday, I was faced with an exploding inbox. While organizing and deleting my mail, I realised I was having trouble classifying each mail into one specific folder. I had the feeling I should be able to link to one email from several folders (e.g. product information should be linked to from the 'vendor' folder, as well as from a specific project folder where this product is used). The more I thought about this, the more I realised that trees (such as the Windows filesystems) are not really ideally suited for organizing data. On UNIX-like filesystems, symbolic links allow the creation of simple graphs for organising data, but I have the feeling data could be organized more efficiently. How does the Slashdot crowd organize their data? How do you manage files, email, contacts, meetings and all the relationships that might exist between them?"
That way, I never need to worry about what folder to put it in.
And I check it twice.
Checking twice really helps.
How do you manage files, email, contacts, meetings and all the relationships that might exist between them?
Easy! Do what I do and don't have any friends, contacts, meetings, or relationships with people!
I started with a Mac back in the day, so I just throw everything on the desktop and clear it out once a month or so...
This is exactly the concept behind virtual folders. The idea is that folders, whether they be in the context of an email program or a filesystem, are actively updated searches. For example, all of your emails could be in one pool, invisible to you. Then each folder would be associated with a rule similar to email filter rules we use now. If an email matches, it shows up, maybe in multiple folders. Bayesian rules allow for even better classifications, if an email is similar enough to several catagories, it can show up in all of them.
Spencer Ogden
I think that Evolution's Virtual Folders will let you do what you describe, for email.
I organize files according to breast size, number of women, and relative perversity of the acts commited.
Duh!
You can't take the sky from me...
...it's a windows only product, but for organizing email on windows boxes, I would recommend Nelson. I use it at work, and it allows me to organize a single email using multiple classifications and has a ton of other feartures. Check it out.
A dash of arbitrary directory trees and a pinch of grep.
But seriously, this subject is kind of lacking. The problem I have with organized storage is keeping it organized. I don't have the time nor the will. I need some sort of automagic organization.
There is a application called "Spring" which has been out for a while now. The company that released it a revolutionary new way to organize and completely tasks.
l
Links to check out:
-Their site(scroll down to "PATHS" for what probably will interest you) http://usercreations.com/spring/SpringContent.htm
tilTrue.info contechtext.info prettypowerful.info twitter.com/frets fb.com/prosody
What I do is I realize "This is all a mess" as I see thousands of files in my home directory. So I created a bunch of subdirectories for various things. (Some were logical, some were just by file type -- /png, /txt, etc.) Then, I found that making such an organized structure was too complicated, and stopped before I acually moved anything into any of the subdirectories.
On Windows, it's slightly different. I save everything to my desktop, then when it gets 'full,' I delete just about everything, realizing I no longer need it.
Not that I RECOMMEND these strategies, but it works.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
porn1
porn2
New Folder
New Folder(1)
unsorted_porn
mp3s
The good news is, that while the Window's file system may not support this, if you wait until 2005 (2006, 2007?), this highly demanded feature will be in the next release of Windows -- yes, everyone's favourite Longhorn will turn everything into a database.
Frankly, I don't think turning an OS into a DBMS is the right thing to do, but for certain applications, having this functionality omnipresent will be useful. Well, OK, for this one application, I'm still waiting to see examples of others.
I love wikis (see also Twiki, a very flexible one, and Openwiki if you prefer M$ technologies): you can organize anything you want, with anyone you want. It's more suited to a workgroup of people, but they work for individuals too. They're totally flexible, extensible, and templatable.
I'm sure people here will come up with ideas like knowledge trees and weird topological concepts, but gimme a wiki any day.
A friend of mine used to use what he termed an archaeological filing system.
It was based on the simple principal that the older something was the further down in the pile it would be.
Your all-in-one-folder technique and "ls -t" would work equally well.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Hmm...this isn't how I do it, but what about something like this:
Disclaimer: This works in theory; practically it would require a hell of a lot of resources.
The basic idea would be a relational database. You've got say the files in one table, and categories in another. The categories can have a parent, so you get something of a tree view going. Then, when you select something from a tree view, it comes up with all items from that category.
Creating this would be easy; optimizing it wouldn't be.
Someone has to bring it up, so it might as well be me! Opera7 mail folders are really filters onto the mail database, meaning you can have the same message in multiple folders. Just in case you didnt know :)
I have my home directory (on a redhat box). the root level of my homedir is my crap directory. dangerously, the organized data lives in there in directories. for example, i have an Organized directory. in there, i have sub directories of different types. i wont go into how that is because i'll change my mind about it once i write it up, and i dont feel like redoing it right now. so, everything just ends up in my home directory until i sort it.
/, and then have a /system/libs/stuff, /system/configs, and all that good stuff. either that or just not see it period. speaking of period, i guess it'd be ~/.system instead of ~/system. I hate organizing my stuff, too. It's arguable how much easier it is to find once I organize it, if my mind one day decides that it should be "schoolwork" and another day "development", et cetera. i guess organizing your piles of junk is like your fingerprint... everyone's is different.
i wish my view of the system was more abstracted. i'd rather have my homedir as
another thing i wish, though, is that the filesystem were more... i dont know what to call it. but i wish i could store more meta data about my files. i wish my filesystem had a comments field, and i wish that doing a directory listing would spit out file attributes like dimensions, content length, number of words, and whatever other stuff i could glean by hand. i just want it to all show up. hell, i wish i could do a recursive directory listing based on file type, not file name. and not based on the extension... cause who says i use extensions? (of course i do, what are you, daft?!) unless its a text file. unix spoiled me and i dont put extensions on those.
heck. i wish there was a way to just export my entire home directory with everything i said into one giant 22 gigabyte compressed file that i can save somewhere, drop into a new computer, and just be up and running again just like that.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
... and grep
;-)
Seriously, I try to keep different partitions set for specific things, this helps in case something gets borked on one drive, it won't mess up other partitions, of course there are backups made to ensure not much is lost.
Try doing something like this (if on *nix)
- /dev/hda3
/home/$USERNAME/pers (personal stuff like diaries or so)
- /dev/hda4
/home/$USERNAME/codes (if you're a programmer)
- /dev/hda5
/home/$USERNAME/music (take a guess)
Get the picture? The good thing about this setup is, one could always umount in case someone gets physical access to the machine, heck it could be scripted to mount and unmount on login and logout. Or you could encrypt the partitions for added security.At first it looks bulky, but in the end it's very easy to maintain since everything tends to fall in place. e.g. If you're scripting you could just cd /home/$USERNAME/code and not have to wonder where to save this. Unless you're really odd (like me) and begin everything with test.c or test.py or something.
MoFscker
All mail are kept into one place (say, a MySQL database). You, however, setup filters (that is, SQL queries) that show your e-mails in virtual folders.
That is, messages can be in as many folders as they meet the selection criterion of.
In addition to the obvious "from", "date", "subject", you could assign an arbitrary number of categories which could constitute more selection criteria.
David Gelertner, the comp sci professor author and unabomber victim, has created software he calls Scopeware. It basically organizes information in a series of related chains. These can be date based or otherwise. I haven't used it, but I've read that he is responding to some of the same concerns you mention.
On a less lofty, but free, note, Evolution has "virtual folders" in which you can place anything a filter expression can select. I use them to sort my email by sender address. I still have my main inbox, and all the categorized subfolders, but the virtual folders select particular people out of the massive mail database. So I can recall that Joe said something three weeks ago that relates to a current problem, and look in the "Joe" virtual folder to find it. There's still no easy way to add arbitrary messages to a virtual folder, other than adding a filter rule that selects just that one message. At least I haven't found a way. But it seems to address part of your concern, for email at least.
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
One folder for offers from Nigerians to make me rich, one folder for penis enlargement, and one folder for pr0n offers... that handles about 99% of my incoming email. Isn't that what everybody else does?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I just export it to my web server, wait a couple of weeks for google to index it, and then google it.
Inbox.
Deleted.
Sent.
the "find" function is a godsend.
I have a organizational system which uses two folders and replication.
Folder 1: INBOX
Folder 2: SENT EMAIL
Any email which is important I send to one or more anal-retentive people who will create nice organized folders in which to store the email. This how I implement replicated storage with automatic retrieval. If I ever need an email back I can simply ask for it and get a copy forwarded to me. Using this method I don't have to waste valuable brain power deciding what folder things go in. As a backup, if for some reason my replicated storage goes on vacation or is out of the office, I can search my sent folder and usually find what I need in there.
This method works extremely well plus it has the advantage of replicated storage which helps thwart hardware failures.
Good luck! Staying organized is a full time job!
Or is that KAOS (as in "Get Smart") ?
I'm currently playing around with putting all my mail messages, bookmarks, web pages loaded, file accesses (on a day to day basis) into a database. Maybe not all the actual data, but the stuff that might help me find it when I need it. I'm hoping to eventually scan everything that changes on my computer or that I do for keywords and so on and then organize them so I can browse them by some kind of visual graph/map metaphor on any of several axes (type of file, date/time, keywords, directory ....).
I want to be able to go in with a query like "sometime in july I did something having to do with a picnic and watermelon" and get a list of possibilities, then be able to rate those in the hopes of finding the exact info I'm looking for.
OK, so far I only have some pieces of it. But I'm getting closer to a database schema for the information and that will help me figure out better what info I need to collect.
I use a tame black hole as a filing system.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
As many people will probably point here, you should check out Evolution's "virtual folders".
JWZ once proposed a more sophisticated approach to store mail without the hierarchical folder structure limits. You can read about it here: Intertwingle
I don't what came out of that. I think it is a good idea still waiting to be implemented.
I have all the email I've ever received stored chronologically in flat files. I use full-text search and navigation tools to locate what I need.
I use much the same technique for organizing the papers in my office.
In general you can spend effort imposing some organizational schema on your data, hoping that your organization will enable you to find information later. Or you can leave the data as it lies, and spend the effort at retrieval time, once you know what you're looking for.
Current tools, particularly those in Windows, aren't particulary amenable for this purpose, but they're getting better. For example, you can download a seearch engine and index your hard drive much like the web.
Even primitive tools like grep work pretty well for a few hundred megabytes of mail.
I know other people have mentioned Evolution's vFolders, but here a little more.
My goal is to never have an email that has value to me land in my inbox. Every time I get an email of "value" which stays in Evolution's inbox, I right click, and "Create Filter from Message". (I'm paraphrasing.)
Every good message should have at least one filter putting it into at least one folder. Some emails have more than one rule, but the whole right click -> create filter thing makes this quick and easy.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Since Windows NT 4 at least, I have been able to make hard links. Granted, the OS didn't come with a tool to do it, but it did support it. Several third party tools are available.
Also, I know in Windows 2000 and Windows XP (and I heard also Windows ME), Folder Shortcuts (these are NOT shortcuts to folders) are also supported. These graft folders into the namespace that actually exist elsewhere. I've tested this across physical drives, and I believe it would also work with network-mapped drives. Note that on Windows XP, you have to temporarily switch to the classic start menu to create a Folder Shortcut.
...organizing data was quite simple for Mac users. (All you Mac people out there have to admit: You're right with me on this. Don't lie!)
The process was simple:
- Save everything to the Desktop.
- When you couldn't see the background pattern anymore, create a new folder called "Desktop crap" or something, and move all the files into it.
- Move the folder on to the hard drive.
- Repeat.
:-DCAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Anti SCO T-Shirts. Donates to the Open Source Now Fund with each purchase.
I use microsoft exchange, and it randomly deletes, my data and users so i don't have to worry about organizing it :)
Sorry, i'm frustrated... I'm setting up an exchange server right now.
It also sounds similar to how Opera handles mail with the M2 e-mail client. It defines "access points" that can (but don't have to) look like folders for jumping into messages that meet a certain criteria. For example, all messages with an attached image are grouped together, as are all messages from a specific person, and all messages meeting some sort of user-defined criteria might also be lumped together under an "access point." In the end though, there really is only one mail box, these tools just allow you to "slice and dice" through your mail.
Keeping email organized is a lot harder than it should be. There is no good way to deal with things like a seminar announcement that I need to keep for two weeks but is junk after that, or stuff that I need to remember to read or reply to but don't want to read right now (or stuff I keep because I should read it but don't want to actually read ever).
It is also hard to remember that, when someone emails me some document, the place to store it is not in an email folder, but a directory dedicated to that project or subject. Like if someone sends a reference for a paper I am writing, it should go in ~/papers/journalname/papername/references or something, not just stay as an attachment in my inbox.
And once in a while, you have to waste a day or two reorganizing your crap and deleting old email. This is especially hard when I have copies of documents or programs on different computers, because I have to figure out which ones are the most recent and are the authoritative copy. CVS and rsync help here; CVS makes it obvious which copy is the best one (the one in CVS), and rsync makes it easy to keep things identical on different machines so you don't have the problem to begin with.
What was the question? Oh yeah. Let google index your entire file tree and use it to find stuff.
I think MIT has a project called Haystack designed just for this
Back in the day, BeOS dumped all the messages in one folder with each message as a separate file (like Maildirs) and used file attributes to add any label (or set of labels) you'd like.
1.msg [ classification=Spam ]
2.msg [ classification=Inbox,classification=Spam ]
The desktop interface let you sort out files based on their attributes. Better e-mail clients also understood some of the common file attributes.
Linux now has attribute based filesystems that are getting mature - it should be possible to do something similar.
A DYI solution, but what on Linux isn't? (:
Nah, I store everything in /dev/random.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
We got a call last week by a customer that was having problems with mail.app (OS X email app) getting "poor performance". Come to find out she, and most everyone at her company, had upwards of 2000 emails in EACH mail folder, and they had many mail folders.
Somewhat at a loss for good ideas, I suggested she try Enterage. That's apparently what they used to use, until they broke its limit of a 2mb index, at which point Enterage crashes.
Sheeeeeeesh. Some people just don't know what it means to keep a clean email inbox. But in her case, their business revolves around receiving customer email, and they're already keeping their mailboxes trimmed down.
Is there any email app for OS X that can handle "industrial" needs?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Ted Nelson's ZigZag system is a new way to store related data without resorting to a relational database. At first glance, it seems really goofy. This is usually an indication (to me, anyway) that it either really is completely goofy, or brilliant beyond my comprehension. Given Nelson's record, I'm inclined toward the latter.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Check out Opera's M2 email client. It uses one massive "received" box and then the emails are distributed, well not actually moved but sorted, into different "views". It is a radical approach to email sorting. Messages from contacts will show up next to their names and also in and of the views you like. You can sort your email in many diffrent ways. You can set one view for, in my case "financial", where all my bank and dreaded credit card stuff goes, and also by "bank" and "credit card". It took a while to get used to but I LOVE IT.
"If this is a sig, and sigs are for losers, then I am a loser..."
I tend to organise my mail by who it is from or who I am having the conversation with. If I am having the conversation with several people, I put the email into the folder with the person who started the conversation.
If there is product specific stuff that I want to put in more than one place, I tend to copy it to text or word or whatever format docs and save it into folders.
Now I am entirely dependant on filters to store stuff into the right folder. Usually all that is left in the inbox is spam or new contacts.
There are things for sales or support staff called "contact managers" or "customer resource managers" (CRM), which let you link up documents and mail and even records of phone conversations and reminders in a more intuitive fashion. I've yet to decide which one is best even though I've spent months trying to figure it out. I guess it is too far away from how I work as a programmer (mostly). There are these ones for example: Le Grand
ACT!
Microsoft have one that they got from Great Plains software
And there is one unix based one that I know of in Finland! Nemein Hmm, having trouble getting it to load but it was there last January. Try looking for Nemein.Net Sales just to prove I'm not imagining it review
Anyway I think some of those things are completely over the top but if your email systems are out of control they may help.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
It's just undocumented.
See this nice app here which set itself as a shell extension. I use it extensively and it works wonder for organizing music, photos, etc.
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
BeOS used file attributes and file system queries to organize data. Longhorn's WinFS is built on this concept. The real question isn't how to organize your files, it's why does your data need to be in files? Why are folders so closely entwined with our computing experience? This type of grouping is best suited for your clothes in your dresser. In real life, tossing everything into a pool and pulling out what you need by characteristics ("attributes") is much more useful.
There's always The Brain (thebrain.com) which has a pretty high geek factor but works on a fairly simple premise that data can be organized many different ways in ones brain and provides paths to information based on those associations.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
While I don't use it, I beleive Opera 7's mail client is designed to allow you to do just that. You can create as many categories as you like, and any given email may belong to any combination of them.
A friend at work waits until his Inbox is over quota (MS Exchange). Then, he'll create a folder called "File Later X" where X is some incrementing number, and move the contents of his inbox to there. So he has several folders: FileLater1, FileLater2, FileLater3, etc.
First, email:
.Net, ASP, PHP, My SQL, Delphi, Outlook, MS Word, etc. all rolled into one. It can link a single email into multiple folders since Notes 3 in 1995.
Get Lotus Notes. I am a Domino evagelist. It is my god! I will spare you the details, but the Domino server and Notes client is the same as
Next Filesystem:
Linux boxes are highly organized already so for Win/Dos/OS2 systems:
Create an OS partition. Only install the OS and patches and device drivers here.
Create an Application partition. Install all applications in a heirarchy starting with Apps and Games and branch apps into Office, Development, Graphics, Utils, MediaPlayback, etc.
Create a Data partition. Create a \Data and a \Temp. Under TEMP put a Downloads, CDBurnoff, Ripping, Testing, and Receipts & Status. Under Data put Documents, Media, Source, Settings, and Pictures.
That should get you started. Create a catalog.txt file and put it on your desktop with notes about where everything should go. Good luck scaling up to 200 GB and keeping your head from exploding!!
SCO: 800-726-8649
Verisign: 800-361-8319, 888-642-9675
Diebold: 800-433-VOTE (8683)
It helps to have a filesystem designed with Database features in mind (ie. just like the BeOS file system). Emails are stored as normal files, with attributes like To, From, Title etc stored in the database. The same concept can be used for media files (MP3 attributes are stored into the database). When you wish to search your data, you can write queries, which are live on the BeOS, and have the results displayed in a directory window.
:-) have been using this feature for years now...
It's rather awkward to explain, but it works amazingly well in practice. Once you've tried it, you realise that there is no need to store data in directories, just make sure that the attributes are up-to-date, and finding any file is a query away. Rumour has it that Windows will adopt a similar system in Longhorn. Yeah, we BeOS users (all 20 of us
Revolution = Evolution
If you're a typical slashdotter i would put it in a folder at the end of the harddrive where it says "infrequently accessed files".
Trolls dont like to be Flamebait, because they burn so well. Protect our Troll heritage!
I think this is a step in the right direction. I have been using it for a while now - check it out.
"The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox) what Google did for the web... The Google principle: It doesn't matter where information is because I can get to it with a keystroke. So what is Zoe? Think about it as a sort of librarian, tirelessly, continuously, processing, slicing, indexing, organizing, your messages. The end result is this intertwingled web of information. Messages put in context. Your very own knowledge base accessible at your fingertip. No more "attending to" your messages. The messages organization is done automatically for you so as to not have the need to "manage" your email. Because once information is available at a keystroke, it doesn't matter in which folder you happened to file it two years ago. There is no folder. The information is always there. Accessible when you need it. In context." ZOE
I put all e-mails in one folder and if I need to find anything I use grepmail:
http://grepmail.sourceforge.net/
If you have OS X check out Zoe:
http://guests.evectors.it/zoe/
I used to beta this thing by this company called Autonomy which would sort and sift all your (and everyone elses) cruft to assemble a list of relevant links (to your stuff and others) in response to your activities.
;-)
IMO it did this in real-time, must have made for some impressive indices.
Maybe this is the answer, open-source Autonomy. I am a mere perlmonks acolyte so I will leave it up to the real brains to figure it out
thebrain (www.thebrain.com) could be used, or at least something like it, to handle this. Basically, everything is treated as a thought and can have multiple parents, siblins, childern.
I've always classified thebrain as 'really neat', but not very usable. Once you put a lot of information into it, the interface becomes difficult to use. But the concpet is still sound.
I have a large storage. I found that if you want to organize anything without symbolic links you must stick with a strict model. In my root I organize any platform specific applications and others into platform named directories. (eg: Win32, Linux, MAC, Palm, PPC, etc...) I also have directories called Incoming, ISOs, Media, and Projects I also have a seperate share for my, and my wifes user profiles.
Under the Win32 folder I have a scheme of Applications, Gaming, Drivers, Servers, etc... Under Linux I have a scheme similar to Source, Binaries, Modules, etc...
Once I decided on that organization model it was really easy to just keep expanding the same principle to subdirectories.
You talk better than you fool!
I don't use evolution myself at the moment (currently preferring mozilla-mail for some weird reason) but vfolders are supposed to be good at handling your kind of situation, where you want to classify certain mails in more than one way. Just put everything in a big archive folder and have various vfolders set up to categorise mail in different ways.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Not sure if this has been mentioned (probably has), but the new Longhorn release of Windows is supposed to be shipped with a new file system (WinFS) which does exactly what you need. It (again, all just theory right now) will work by using a SQL database instead of a FAT table. This means you can now classify files.
So you'll access a "folder" which basically has a list of properties, and all files with those properties will be show. So if I want all my pictures from my vacation to hawaii, as well as my monthly financial reports, I'd create a folder that "contains" all files on those subjects, and whenever I accessed that folder it'd show me all files that fit those catagories. But on the same hand I can have another "folder" which shows me just my vacation pictures.
Ok, now to actually answer the question posed here (as opposed to what a lot of other people here are doing, which is either come up with something witty or else attempt to codify a sweeping new all-inclusive whiz-bang OS change).
Ahem.
I know the question is asking about emails, files, contacts, and meetings, but as I keep relatively few contacts permanently filed and don't much like meetings, I'll address what I do about files and emails.
Files: I start with a simple folder: "Files". In my case, "D:\Files". (I like folders Windows doesn't much know about, nor mess with.) Inside that, I have pretty much a heterogeneous hodgepodge of hierarchies of folders: "Projects", "Photos", "Temp" (big one, that), etc. Nothing earth-shattering.
Emails: I try to organize these into folders denoting conversational thread ("Buddies", "List Stuff", "Family", "Work", etc.), combined with where they are in my email-processing conveyor belt ("To Do" (I haven't replied yet), then "Transfer" (I've replied, but not archived), then "Done" (archived and ready for deletion)), for whichever conversational threads I want to save. Using the examples above would result in:
- List Stuff
- Work
- To Do - Buddies
- To Do - Family
- Transfer - Buddies
- Transfer - Family
- Done - Buddies
- Done - Family
(I would use a bit of hierarchy here, like:- List Stuff
- Work
- To Do
- Buddies
- Family
- Transfer
- Buddies
- Family
- Done
- Buddies
- Family
, except Yahoo! Mail doesn't allow folder nesting. (And before you laugh at me for using Yahoo! Mail, can you access your mail at any web browser anywhere? How many times have you changed addresses in the last 5 years? I haven't at all.))And that's pretty much it.
(Hey, you asked...)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I have pondered the same thing. Being a relational fan, I of course lean toward sets instead of (or in addition to) trees. Here is my webpage describing various post-tree approaches and interfaces:
http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/sets1.htm (I know, geocities sucks, but there are too many links to it already to switch.)
Table-ized A.I.
I know other users have already pointed out how well Evolution works for sorting mail, but I just wanted to attest to how well it works even for large amounts of email.
I used to create new folders for specific types of email, but I found it very difficult to manage and search all the folders after a while, so I ended up moving all of my email to a single folder, Inbox. I currently have 24,949 messages in my Inbox and Evolution is still extremely fast when it comes to sorting and searching through them all.
I also make use of the excellent VFolders feature of Evolution, to save frequent searches into their own folders. I've been using Evolution now for several years, and it just keeps getting better and better.
--It's Pimptastic!--
Thank you 3M.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
For file systems I use symbolic links in a column viewed filesytem. I really like what a company formerly known as NeXT has done with some of their products. Their software for pictures and music both have a "Library". From there you can drag songs or pictures into "Playlists" (music) or "Albums" (photos).
Very cool.
As for software, I use OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner from OmniGroup. OmniOutliner is especially simple, yet unique. I wonder why no one else has an idea organizer that is so incredible? I couldn't do my job without it. Well, I could, but I'd use a lot of paper or spend a lot of time in OpenOffice messing around with things.
IMHO, tree structures work best for people who don't mind branching structures that sound illogical, just so every branch has at least a few files in the end folders. For example, if you have e-mail relating to 10 programs you use, and you are comfortable lumping 8 or so filed e-mail docs in "freeware" because that's all you have there, and then not making folders for "shareware" and "commercial software", but organizing those by company because you have an average of five files per company there, then tree view can work for you. If you 'have' to make folders by company for each company once you start with that method, and a lot of those folders end up containing only 1 or 2 documents each, you aren't really gaining productivity by being more 'logical'. It looks neat and organized, but you end up with a number of folders = or > than the files, and so it requires as much mental effort as looking at a single list of files, unsorted. Possibly you could set a goal, like my directory structure should look only about 1/4 as complex as the raw filenames all viewed together, or each folder should have at least 3 items in it, but no more than 12.
Who is John Cabal?
We use lotus notes at our organisation and I find it a great email client (for corporate mail). It has great folder support, there's only one document in the database, but it can be displayed in any number of folders. There's also the views which are defined by the admin which show what they're told. This means that you might remove a document from all folders, but still be able to find it in All Documents.
The only down side to Notes is that it's quite expensive, but it does run on Linux *grins*
Z
For me, I find that the ideal way to organize things would be a combination of folders, piles, and stored searches (or virtual folders). While folders don't always meet my need, I still find that they are a perfect starting or ending point for information. Say if I'm starting to research on "Small World Networks", I almost always start by creating a folder, to place collected data. But while researching, I often find the need for saved states--its one of the primary reasons why I enjoy tabbed browsing. Being able to quickly saved 5 or 20 open sites, and then go back to them is just great.
The concept of piles, I love as well, the ability to just quickly dump things into piles of interest, that can be later organized better, is a great concept. Typically when something is active it need to be related to lots of other things, and for me the piles concept allows this. Of course this brings me to stored searches.
I find I used the concept of stored searches like data mining. I typically do it for past projects, or to gain new insight on past experiences. I remember Sherlock use to allow you to save search criteria as a clickable link that would then rerun and update the results when selected. I don't think the new version does, but I am hoping that Apple will introduce the opportunity to do so, when they start making improvements on the new finder to be introduced in Panther.
And when you delete a message from one folder, it's deleted from all of them!
If you are deleting an email, that implies that you are done with the information. If you just want to reorganize it, then you (the user) should understand what it means to organize.
The problem is that users are trained on the MS vision that everything can only exist in one place and to put it in two places requires making a copy. This approach has problems:
1. Very wasteful of hard drive space. You need to have complete copies of a document in every folder/directory it belongs. Today hard drive space is cheap, but MS is trying to grow the data file sizes to keep up.
2. Each copy is not updated with the others. You usually forget which should be the master copy. And the users don't care about maintaining the master copy; they want to work on the one to which they have access. Making it read-only means there will be even more copies made so people can get their work done.
Unix/Linux users have symbolic links. They are exposed to them very early, and learn that a link to a file can be treated as the file, for everything except its organization. Updating the file updates it everywhere.
Lotus Notes allows all approaches:
1. You can make copies. Copy/Paste always does this.
2. You can make links. Dragging always does this.
3. You can put links to anything inside other documents. This allows you to send a memo with links to the documents that need your attention.
4. You have Views, which show all documents based on selection formulas.
5. It has great filtering capabilities. You can show all documents that contain the word "slashdot" that were created between 2 dates.
But is a first-time user going to expect it? Of course not, he thinks the folders work like everywhere else, and copy means make a copy, not just a link.
Your "first-time user" expects "the folders work like everywhere else"?
- A first-time user should not have a problem. They learn what happens without any expectations.
- A "first-time user" that has been using MS products for a while should know never to expect consistent results. Try dragging a file in MSWindows:
1. If it is an executable, it will create a Shortcut.
2. If it is to the same hard drive, it will move the file. (And remember that "My Documents" and "Desktop" are usually on the C Drive.)
3. If it is to a different hard drive, it will make a copy. (What happens if it is a mapped network share on the same computer?)
That is 3 different results from the same user action! So how do folders work everywhere else?
---
Anyway, I expect MS to die soon. Windows will wither without MS. The next generation of users will probably start with Linux and be better off.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
What, you thought there was more?
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
It's worked well for me and my tens of thousands of email messages.
So is that why you missed the barbeque?
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Try the "Slashdot I-mail Classification Kludge Linkage Yielder" (SICKLY). Everything falls into one of these classifications:
1. Overrated
2. Underrated
3. Troll
4. Flame-bait
5. Profit!
Oh, and it only runs on a Beowulf Cluster of Linuxes (Lini?). And, don't ask how it runs in Soviet Russia.
Table-ized A.I.
I've got a directory archive of mail going back well into the 80's. The only detail about a given message I can usually count on remembering is the sender or recipient. I give each correspondent a separate subdirectory with the name of email alias (last name, sometimes with initials). I have a few special folders for "receipts," "strangers," and corporate spam. Special folders for specific topics have never worked out, mostly because topics overlap too heavily. Grep works fine for the rare cases where I remember the content but forget the correspondent.
(Reality reasserts itself sooner or later.)
Have a look at http://guests.evectors.it/zoe/
It is wonderfully easy to use, and does everything you want. Oh, it does take a bit of getting used to.
Evolution has addressed this with its email "VFolders" for some time; these act much like a saved search across all of your folders.
A simple example is creating a VFolder that will show all items flagged "Important", allowing you to immediately view and modify any such email. Any changes you make to messages within a VFolder applies to that actual message, wherever it resides, kind of like a hard-link.
It sounds like what you want is the file system from Windows Longhorn. As I understand it, it will be using SQL Server 2004 (Yukon) for the entire file system. It seems self-evident that using a relational database for all files would result in a single table for files, and a table of attributes, search terms, subjects, etc., so that a file could be found any number of ways.
This is pretty clearly a better system. The only thing that concerns me is that every existing set of programming-language file system tools expects to be working with directory trees, even if they do support different delimiter characters, name length limits, multiple vs. single roots (drive letters vs. '/'), etc. I expect they will include some sort of mapping to a traditional hierarchy, though, as VB will have just as much trouble with the new system as Java will.
News story about it (news.com)
You can take that a step further and use IMAP with fetchmail and procmail. Set it up once and fine tune as needed and have one set of folders and filtering available to any IMAP client.
The backup is easy if working with standard mailbox style folders because the format is text, readable by any viewer. You can tgz your mail directory to a file via cron. I back mine up on a rotating basis to a different drive. For things I know I will never need but want to keep anyway or for archiving important things, I create a new IMAP folders with my client, move the messages over to that folder, tgz it and move it out of the mail directory. If I ever need it, I can extract it back to the mail directory and view it again or I can add more mail to the archive file later with a few commands I am not familiar with the native format of any mail clients anymore because I have been using IMAP for years. I switched for two reasons, I got tired of always trying to convert proprietary mail formats everytime I wanted to change mail clients and I wanted access to all of my mail regardless of what type of machine or where I was coming from. I will never go back no non-IMAP. The fetchmail and procmail functionality are an added bonus. You get the most from IMAP when it is running 24/7 on a stable machine somewhere on your local/home network. If you don't have such a thing already in place, it might not be worth the initial effort.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
- Keeping a master database "brain" of all of the RPG characters, players, and NPCs, along with web resources and useful files (e.g. PDFs of character sheets).
- A logical map of the corporate network, including routers, switches, and whatnot. Since the "thoughts" can be links, files, or just text, I set it so that opening a router "thought" will start a telnet session, a server thought starts a terminal server session to that server, etc. Those were purely arbitrary. The links between network devices are color-coded by type (T1, dialup, DSL, etc). The network admin about crapped himself when I showed him--and then appropriated it for his own use.
- Story aid. My wife likes to write, and she can link up characters, locations, events, and plot points in entirely arbitrary manners however she pleases.
It's worth playing with, and some may find it worth purchasing. If I used Windows more, I would.I'd still like to get into wikis, though. =)
I've used Opera's email client for a while, and am pretty happy with it. It provides what they call 'access points', which seem to be about the same conept as the above mentioned virtual folders. New access points can be created along with filtering criteria for each, and incoming email is assigned to one or more access points, if the filtering criteria match. I've found this to be a pretty powerful way of managing my email, since I can change the... well, the 'perspective' or angle, from which I look at my inbox. I can view email by contacts (sender addresses), unread, or any arbitrary access point I have created. That makes managing email, especially when having to assign email to several 'view points' in lack of a better term, based on several criteria, as described above.
Ok, now to actually answer the question posed here (as opposed to what a lot of other people here are doing, which is either come up with something witty or else attempt to codify a sweeping new all-inclusive whiz-bang OS change).
This is slashdot; what do you expect?
After a lot of vareity of putting stuff in folders I realised that my mind does not think
the same way while organising, as while looking for something. I never seem to find
the right folder when I want it.
So now I am using evolution, put all mails (except SPAM, CVS, Bug reports etc) in INBOX
folder and create virtual folders based on keywords. But most of my successful hits are
when I filter for keywords over this INBOX folder as I need info. Its works 90% of the time.
Infact another rule in conjunction to this: Never delete anything
I am next going to break my INBOX into separate folder for each 3-months and try doing the
filters over the whole set of inboxes.
DO NOT PANIC
Have you given a thought to this guy's work? The links are funky because he moved servers, but PhotoSeek indexes documents as well. Not sure if this is what you're after, but it does a variety of formats and such.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I was not really asking for help. I am in the habit of ALWAYS right-button dragging when using MSWindows. That way I can choose what I want it to do regardless of the situation-sensitive default. (I thought it was obvious from the post that I understand how it works.)
.COM) create Shortcuts when dragged. Apparently MS does not consider BAT files to be executable. All other files (including .BAT and .DLL) are moved if on the same drive.
.EXE?
The problem with the using CTRL and/or SHIFT + Drag is that it takes two hands. Files are not heavy. I like that I can move them with one hand.
The qualification for when it creates a Shortcut is the same as everything else in MSWindows: what is the file extension? Executable files (.EXE and
Checked in Win98: Dragging SPOOL.EXE creates a Shortcut. Has that changed for WinXP, or is the spooler no longer a
My point was that the parent to my post suggested that Lotus Notes was not following the standard set by MS, and I was suggesting that MS had no standard.
---
The moderators are having FUN! My post above is currently:
+ 2 Insightful
+ 2 Informative
-3 Troll
For a total of:
+ 1 Troll
I guess some Slashdotters REALLY do not like Lotus Notes, or having it suggested that Notes follows the Unix ideas for files.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
The most USEFUL directories you can create are three personal tmp directories, like so:
- tmp
- tmpSep
- tmp2003
When you do that, you instantly get rid of clutter: small files that you don't really care about, but want to keep for some finite amount of time.There are many more techniques. I'd like to write about them some time, but now is not that time.
There is a significant body of knowledge around this subject that was developed by librarians. See this article for an introduction.
Another example: Jef Raskin's Canon Cat information appliance eschewed files completely. You located a document by typing words that are in it, in efect making the whole document its own filename.
The approach I find most powerful is set-oriented. I use an app called IMatch to manage my digital photos. Its sophisticated set-oriented category system makes it very easy to locate an image. That is what Microsoft is attempting with Longhorn's unified data store, or in more forward-looking projects like MyLifeBits.
The base directory describes the block.
Take for example software. There are two possible ways of sorting this: stuff from vendors and stuff by structure. I use both, but the majority of stuff gets stored in the vendor tree, and the minority under the opsys tree. So if i want a non-descript OS/2 utility for file management, i would look under opsys/os2/fileman/ while something from say file commander/2 [which i use a lot] is /vendor/fileman/harvard/os2/.
Personal stuff gets stored under the tdisk tree. These are grouped under broad catergories, eg 'maths', and then a date directory. eg: /tdisk/maths/nbfk/
The whole idea is if ye take a bucket-load of backup cdroms, ye should get a single tree that is easy to sort through.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
better !pout !cry
/etc/passwd > list
better watchout
lpr why
santa claus town
cat
ncheck list
ncheck list
cat list | grep naughty > nogiftlist
cat list | grep nice > giftlist
santa claus town
who | grep sleeping
who | grep awake
who | grep bad || good
for (goodness sake) {
be good
}
The more I try to strongly 'type' my data, the longer it takes to deal with it. Big general buckets work the best for me.
I don't always succeed at that, but I do try. Sometimes I don't produce the same neural network or mneumonic-map that I did two years ago for the same datum, and then it gets lost. So the more general, the better.
It sounds very much like the concept of WFS in Longhorn. Virtual folders should be done easily with a SQL-based filesystem. However we still have to wait at least two years for Longhorn to arrive.
The idea is to "attach" qualifiers to data, so that the data doesn't have to be ordered in a hierarchical way. The data is looked for dynamically, as the system creates a tree structure on the fly, based on the qualifiers the user has attached to the data.
Example: A novel on the history of mathematics would by one user be stored in the folder "History" and another user would look for it in "Science". The ICMS solution lets the user attach "History", "Science" and "Novel" to the book, so that he himself (and other users) can find the book by looking in the folder "History" AND/OR "Novel" AND/OR "Science".
Neat eh?
(If you're interested in buying anything from them, contact me at mathieu.dhondt at quatris.be - I'll give you a discount).
"Those innocent fun games of the hallucination generation"
I organize my emails by putting everything in a single folder. No need to agonise over classification or get grumpy at myself for misfiling. Then I use ISYS to find whatever I need to find, using a plain english description of my need. Works a treat. ISYS is a swiss army knife search tool, but best of all, there's a stripped-down, email-only version coming out in a couple of weeks.
That is 3 different results from the same user action! So how do folders work everywhere else?
Well, IMO the real problem is not whether one maufacturer or another has his own user interface rules, it is the fact that folders and documents were introduced as the universal metaphor for arranging data on a computer in the first place.
And now we are stuck with the restrictions imposed by that representation, which will often lure first-time users into believing that just because it looks like real-life a folder it will behave like a real-life folder. No matter how you then try to squeeze the concept of links, views, etc, into some kind of association with this rather limited concept, you are likely run into problems. What, really would be the real-world counterpart of a symbolic link, a virtual forlder (!), a view, etc?
The file/folder metaphor comes from an age where files were few and far between for the average user. Maybe we need a completely new user interface concept to deal with today's overload of data.
This solution only works for email, but it's very nice once it's set up.
.txt with form feed separated emails.
I used a free app (the name eludes me) to export my PST folders to
Then I wrote a python script that could recognize the different plain-text formats of the various clients I have used (The Bat, Rebecca Mail, etc) and chew them all into one the same format (plaintext with FF separation), after which I wrote another script that put them all into a MySQL database with separate fields for headers, body and the most used fields like from, to and subject.
Then I set every email program I have to leave messages on the server, and instead I now have a script that takes all my email every 3 days and sticks it into my database.
Then I made a nice little interface for searching emails, and it is SO much nicer and faster than anything any email program has ever offered me in terms of searching, and I am free to switch email clients as much as I want to.
Give me liberty or give me kill -s 9
Categories are a feature of MS Outlook; it probably exists in other clients as well (Evolution?), but my experience is with Outlook.
Outlook allows you to assign any number of categories to any object. An object can be an e-mail, task, contact, appointment, etc. Outlook comes with a list of "common sense" categories out of the box, but the user can make up categories as he/she sees fit.
If you keep all your messages in one folder and assign them to categories, you can use Outlook views to sort through the data however is most applicable at the time. One of the built-in views is "By Category". Items are grouped by category, then further sorted by whichever field you prefer within each category. If an item is in more than one category, it will be displayed multiple times in the list, inside the appropriate category grouping. It is better than folders, I assure you!
You can assign categories to objects multiple ways:
I find categories particularly useful for contacts and appointments, as they quite often fall into multiple categories. For example, a contact might be a family member, but also a member of my local LUG (Linux Users Group), and also works at a certain company where I have several business contacts. Folders simply won't do in this situation; I have no desire to maintain three seperate contact entires, but I want the contact to show in all three groups. But with categories, happiness ensues.
At work I'm forced to use Lotus Notes 4.5.5 (yup, the 1995 version).
I do not like its interface, its menu structure and generally the way it works. (see the interface hall of shame for details on that)
However, it has some excellent search features built in (fast & reliable) and my only favorite option: the "All documents" folder, where all records are piled onto one big pile for me to search in. Really handy. So I can make folders and organise, but if I want I can just pretend there's only this one big folder.
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
I'm very spoiled. We use Lotus Notes at work for mail and applications. Notes has a construct called multivalue fields that can be used to create multiple categories (similar to folders) for grouping and sorting of data. I can file mail in as many categories as I like via use of categories. Simple idea that works great
I personally use ls -Flatrck
.files
;P
F = show file type with final character
l = long directory format (detailed)
a = even the
t = sort by time
r = reverse the order
c = by change date
k = block size of 1k... not really useful, but helps me remember the alias to make on a new system.
On FreeBSD, before BSD died(*) I would use ls -Flatrock but the 'o' has a different meaning with the GNU ls (omit group column in long output) than the BSD ls (include the file flags in the long output).
(*) Before the -1 Flamebait, I mean 'Died on my system'. I decided to install RedHat instead though, because as everyone knows: BSD is dying.
Evolution has this virtual folder concept, which allows you to set up filters that will decide in which folders mail appear - allowing one mail to apper in multiple folders (but still only having one copy of the mail).
:)
Furthermore when you update the filters, your virtual folders are (of course, by means of the way that it is implemented) updated.
I used it for a while and it worked great. Until I started having more mail, then it started getting slow. Then it got really slow. I quit evolution entirely when it was unable to show any of the mails in my inbox, using virtual folders or not.
In short, the feature is in evolution, but if you have a lot of mail lying around (an inbox with 20-30k e-mails), it just doesn't work. Evolution has some nice features, they're just not implemented in a way so that they work on anything but toy mailboxes. Which is really a pity, since the ideas were great.
Now, I'm on bogofilter+procmail+kmail, and I'm fairly happy with that. No virtual folders, but I can read my mail again. Yippie!
Hi,
the problem you describe is really terrible - with the folder structure you always have to decide on the order of folders. What I want are not exactly folders but keywords, and then you can search by keyword.
Actually, there is a tool available at
http://www.mail-sleuth.comwhich does this. You can assign keywords which then appear as folders. But if you give for example the keywords "Slashdot" and "interesting" you'll find the "Slashdot" folder as subfolder in the "interesting" folder and vice-versa. Also it comes with a nice graphical representation.
Unfortunately, it's currently only available as MS Outlook-plugin, but they plan to develop also a plugin for Mozilla (at least I was told so at the conference I saw the presentation of the tool). If you want other things, just bug them - the e-mail address is on the website.
Cheers,
JoThe Good, Easy system worked for me back when I used it. The premise is to get everything into plain text, and use simple tools to manage it. There's a Wired article on it, and the source documents to the Good, Easy Desktop and Good, Easy email are at Winterspeak.
First and foremost, leave everything in your inbox.
"But the point of this excercise is to _organize_ my ifnormation!"
Well, yes. Which brings me two the second mechanism(s): use Evolution's v-folders. I really wish that more clients supported v-folders, because they the ideal metaphor for e-mail soft links. So, now you're stuff's "organized" in one folder, and many sub-folders. Why is the "one folder" bit important? Because -- and here's the nifty part -- you can now grep/Perl/regex the hell out of it with a fair bit of facility.
$.02
i had a similar problem a while back and i started beating on it with postgresql and perl. it's actually getting to a nice polished state. currently it's webbased, but i think my roommate wrote something for the console also.
/mnt/fsroot/set1/a/2/3/a23f55abab...
here's the skinny. i store files in a tree based on their checksum. so the file with the checksum a23f55abab... would be stored like this:
then i store pointers to this file in a database along with different metadata (mimetype, original file name, keywords, mount point (set1), etc). then i define lists based on queries to the database.
so i could have a list like:
images::vacation::italy 2001
the images would have keywords like
italy, vacation, 2001
and the query defining that list would look something like:
keywords:vacation and
keywords:italy and
keywords:2001 and
mime_type:image
i need to commit this stuff to the CVS, but it seems to work.
-- john
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
you seem to be suggesting that we "metatag" documents/files. this is actually a great idea, if you think about it.
unfortunately, the problems associated w/ creating such a system effectively and then diligently assigning the appropriate values to each and every document/file becomes prohibitive.
f'rex: let's take the example of pr0n. you could metatag based on area(s) of interest: e.g., b&d, lesbian, groups, etc. assigning the proper values would allow you to search for the ahem desired file.
however, if you want to implement such a system on an existing datastore, you've got a pretty daunting task ahead of you.
theoretically, something in the OS or search tool you're using could offer the option to assign the appropriate tags.
but then you run into some problems: what if something isn't [x] enough to be [x], but contains those elements? is minor [x] enough to get classified that way? do you need an integer value or something to describe just how [x] something is?
and this would hardly be universal: one person's art is another person's pr0n.
ed
Hmm, when I try clicking on it I get this place of work's ACCESS DENIED banner page.
I guess you can't access it *anywhere*
8-PP
Take a look at
ZOE. It does all this and more.
So, for email, I keep folders to a minimum of about 6. But because time is so important, I tier those, so that anything older than a week goes into a mirror folder structure under OLD. Then anything older than a month is moved into ARCHIVE. And the archive stuff is compressed, so I have to really want to look at it.
Loose information is another problem, with a simple index-card like solution. A lot of the information we need is small, like "joe's phone number", and doesn't warrant a whole file. For that I actually throw all the information into a single big file, where each datum is one line (grep-able). The information has no structure. I often cut and paste random stuff. Then I have a search that just pulls out entries which match all terms:For filesystems, I found the reiser guys have some very pertinent ideas, albeit in need of further development. http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.htmlFor shared stuff, I really like having an unofficial document system, and my favorite is The Moin Moin Wiki because it's fairly simple to use and install.
/charles