Sorry Mac folks, this article is very Windows specific, however, it is worth a read. How many times it has happened to you that you had to look for a recipe you used or a code snippet you wrote several years ago. That's easy, you say. You have a clever folder structure for organizing documents and you put your recipes and code snippets buried in those folders. You have a crafty search program like Agent Ransack, which goes through your files in a second and find the content you were looking. Actually for tools like Agent Ransack, you don't even have to organize your files in folders. It will find whatever you are looking by searching the file name or its content. This will work, provided you always have access to your laptop. Other than the accessibility, the file model needs a lot more to be desired.
In the past I used digital post it notes for this purpose. The easiest one was to maintain the notes in Outlook. The notes were synchronized to my iPhone, and the life was great. For reasons unknown to me, Apple decided to remove this sync option, forcing me to use iCloud notes. It works, I can read these notes from my iPhone as well as from a web browser, and they sync well. My pet peeve with iCloud site is that it takes so long to load. The two factor authentication kicks in whenever it feels like it. The searches don't work right. Besides, who is to say that Apple will remove the Notes feature completely, in future. There are commercial options like Evernote. First of all, the idea of paying a monthly fee for the rest of your life for post it notes, is crazy. Secondly, one day Evernote may get bought out by, say Facebook, and Facebook decides that it does not fit into their social media model, and kill the product. The bottom line is that you have to take matters into your own hand and take control of your own content. In the next sections I will show you how you can do this with little to no cost.
I implemented a wiki solution for my need. The best example of a wiki software is Wikipedia, which is essentially maintaining web pages without using any special web authoring tools. Of course a wiki software is about collaboration too, but in our use case, we won't be using it.
In the past I used digital post it notes for this purpose. The easiest one was to maintain the notes in Outlook. The notes were synchronized to my iPhone, and the life was great. For reasons unknown to me, Apple decided to remove this sync option, forcing me to use iCloud notes. It works, I can read these notes from my iPhone as well as from a web browser, and they sync well. My pet peeve with iCloud site is that it takes so long to load. The two factor authentication kicks in whenever it feels like it. The searches don't work right. Besides, who is to say that Apple will remove the Notes feature completely, in future. There are commercial options like Evernote. First of all, the idea of paying a monthly fee for the rest of your life for post it notes, is crazy. Secondly, one day Evernote may get bought out by, say Facebook, and Facebook decides that it does not fit into their social media model, and kill the product. The bottom line is that you have to take matters into your own hand and take control of your own content. In the next sections I will show you how you can do this with little to no cost.
I implemented a wiki solution for my need. The best example of a wiki software is Wikipedia, which is essentially maintaining web pages without using any special web authoring tools. Of course a wiki software is about collaboration too, but in our use case, we won't be using it.
Choosing a wiki software
There are so many free open source wiki engines available. All of them are more than adequate for our need. I wanted the software to be simple and lightweight. I specifically looked for plain text files based wiki software. The two top contenders were:
TiddlyWiki is a JavaScript based wiki with just one file. Everything is stored in this file. If you have only very small amount of information to be stored, this solution will work for you fine. You can copy this file to your iPhone or host it somewhere for ready access.
I chose DokuWiki, because I have literally thousands of notes, with code snippets, recipes, random writings, and account numbers etc. I needed them to be in separate files and readily searchable. DokuWiki can create a custom installation package for you with only the components you need.
Download DokuWiki
Go to the download link.
Select the stable version.
Make sure you check MicroApache (Windows) checkbox.
This makes a micro web server to be included in the package. Remember, there is no need to install PHP or anything else.Remove unwanted languages from the package
Skip the plugins in the initial install.
Unzip the installer package
The installer package may not be in .exe or .msi format, that you can double click on it and execute it. It may be in .tgz format. Install 7Zip utility to unzip the .tgz files. You may want to extract DokuWikiStick folder from the zip file and run run.cmd.
Configure DokuWiki
Follow the instructions. You will be asked to rename dokuwiki\install.php file, after configuration is done. Note that nothing really gets installed (You have love the Unix folks for that.) You start the Apache webserver using run.cmd only, and your Wiki is up and running. You can access it through a web browser. You can always tweak the port it runs. Note that you have to run run.cmd, to start DokuWiki server, every time you login to your machine. If you are like me, you may want to configure it to run as a service.
Configure DokuWiki to auto-start as a service
- Download WinSw from GitHub.
Try not to build the solution yourself. I got ton of errors. Try to get the pre-built exe if you can. - Copy WinSw.exe to the same folder where run.cmd exists.
- Rename WinSw.exe to dokuwiki.exe (You can pick any name.)
- Create an xml file, dokuwiki.xml (the name must match with the exe in the prior step.)
In our example run.cmd resides under c:\DokuWikiStick.
- Open command prompt in Admin mode and run the following command from the location where run.cmd is residing.
dokuwiki install –overwrite - Fix the permission on the c:\DokuWikiStick folder so that this service can read and write to files in this folder. EveryOne full control is fine, if you are the only user on your machine.
Access from iPhone or iPads on your LAN
This Wiki is not accessible from the Internet. However, it is not a hard task. With a port forwarding on your router, you can set this up for access from outside. Having said that, I would say, try not to do it if you have a lot of sensitive information on this site.
If you want to access the Wiki within your LAN or Wifi Network from iPhone or iPad, make sure you use the.local suffix after the host name in the url.
If you want to access the Wiki within your LAN or Wifi Network from iPhone or iPad, make sure you use the
After your DokuWiki is ready. Learn the basic syntax and you are on your way to being organized by creating bite size post it notes to yourself. Remember, there is nothing wrong or right about how you want to organize the content. Just remember to put as many tags in your content so that you can search it later with ease. Take frequent backup of the DokuWikiStick folder and you will have your content for the rest of your life.
Happy organizing!
Happy organizing!
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