Nick Projects

As a gadget person, I come across all kinds of data.  One of the issues I run into is finding a way to archive that data or find it again when I need it.  There are a few tools I have been using and like for this purpose.

Wordpress is treated more as a blogging solution than a personal database.  But,  if you think about it the two aren’t really all that different.  Both allow you to organize information in a way that’s easy to search and find.  Both allow file uploads and linking to external documents. So,  why split hairs.  

The truth is,  that wordpress is really easy to use and has so many plugins that it is a great way to aggregate information public or not.  Of course,  it is a web based platform so if you want to be archiving your tax documents you probably don’t want that on a web server anywhere.  Luckily,  there is this way cool company called jumpbox (www.jumpbox.com) that distributes virtual machine images of many web based platforms and wordpress is on their free list.  If your interested in wordpress check them out.  

  Evernote is a more traditional personal database.  In my opinion the best feature of evernote is that it has amazing OCR capabilities.  You can even search on handwritten documents and not so great scanned images.  The downside of evernote is that it is really designed to archive information to a central website.  This is a double edged sword.  On one hand it’s great to be able to sync notes across multiple computers and handheld devices.  On the other your space is limited and your security is a bit suspect ( although probably just fine).  Evernote also makes it easy to archive emails and websites which is pretty cool.  

Zotero is a solution designed for academic purposes.  Like evernote it can clip websites for archiving,  but it allows you to store all of your data locally or on a private solution like jungledisk.  Zotero also records academic standard source citation information.  This is great if you are researching to get a paper out or if you tend to do research for this purpose.  Zotero is also able to pull source information off of most academic databases.  

Mendley is sort of like zotero,  but it has a social component.  Mendeley is good if you are working in a group and have an academic focus. Mendeley should be able to handle larger data sets than zotero,  but again the focus is on community research.  I keep thinking a platform like this would make a great solution for a small programing group.

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