Every so often, you get stuck...and sometimes you run into a problem that you know you've solved before, right? Often for me it's some annoying issue with a dev tool.
After having to experience re-Googling and re-researching, I've been trying to use browser bookmarks and notes as a sort of library by topics/tags to keep a history of fixes to problems that I encounter. Sometimes they never come up again, but occasionally they do.
What tools do you guys use to combat the dreaded re-Googling? Or are you okay with re-Googling?
Oldest comments (28)
I'm curious about this as well. I have some personal methods, like the notes app on my Mac. I prefer it to similar things I have used, but nothing I have used seems like the ideal solution.
Something nice in my mind would be an app where I can dump links into and it would download them, and then crawl and index the content. So in the future I can just have an OS-enabled hot key to quickly search the local index with zero latency.
Would love to know if something like that exists with good UX.
That sounds like a perfect tool. Some spin on something like this?
I'm hijacking the "name" field in Chrome bookmarks to add tags so they come up easily in search. Like "Some title (tag tag tag)".
But I also use the Notes app on my Mac. I guess I use the Notes app when they're fixes I resolve on my own (and therefore my own writeup/explanation) because there aren't external url references. So my fixes are scattered in two places, Notes and Chrome bookmarks.
Yeah, it would be like that. I'd see it as a browser extension with a "send-to-my-index" button of sorts which would then archive it locally and index for full-text search.
I think the key is it has to be easy to use and work like Mac launcher or Alfred, etc. Or else I might never end up using it.
I'd be surprised if something like this doesn't exist. I'll send some more eyeballs to this thread at some point so we can get to the bottom of this.
In fact I developed it as a sideproject.
It does full text indexing, there are chrome/firefox extensions and there are a simple fabebook and twitter autoimport integrations, but it's not local, it's an online service.
Nowadays only few coworkers and me are using it, if you're interested i can send you and invite for registration.
The page is ricube.net
[Pocket] is easy to dump links into, and it downloads the pages.
Now that they've been acquired by Mozilla it should become easy to add the remaining required features as
I also really like the idea of not having to trust links to work in the future.
I have a couple ideas that I have yet to put into practice but am pretty excited about .... one is to look for a stackoverflow question about the same bug & answer it, the other is to spin up a quick gist or blog post describing it and my fix. Would keep the information in an easily-findable spot for later and also possibly help the next person who comes along.
Ah, I missed that you were using gists too! I like to keep it all in one gist so it's easy to find, but I haven't added a whole lot to it so I'm not sure it'll scale.
I think as long as there's a good table of contents it should work out fine! Or multiple gists with a gist of reference links...
Because I have a jekyll blog, writing them as blog posts is just as simple for me.
An audio keyword indexing and retrieval system would be ideal, so I could mutter problem keywords and Dictate the solutions while I am working, without typing or context switching.
Searching might still need to be done visually but if the world could evolve a grammar to describe problems ( or embed keywords in help text) then you could get instant feedback to problems through audio as well. Like an Oracle that sits on your shoulder.
I keep a Gist, in markdown so the code and prose both look good. I don't add to it nearly as often as I should, though, so I'm not getting as much mileage out of it as I could.
This is super hard, especially when you're working alone and not in a team of people. In a team, this information tends to get shared somehow, and you might get lucky and someone remembers it.
At work, we use the wiki in gitlab for stupid problems that others might run into. If you've figured out something hard by repeatedly banging your head against it, there's a chance somebody else will also need to figure that out at some point (it doesn't have to be you), so it's worth writing it down.
Not perfect, though. Sometime you get to the end of a rat-hole and can't even remember what all the steps were that got you there. Definitely interested in hearing what others do!
I got tired of re-Googling stuff, so I started doing a couple of things:
I try to add things to my blog and sometimes open them as pull requests in the repo. I also try to use Dash.app to keep bookmarks and annotations in a single place. Also before re-googling anything, I search my browser history first 😁
I put the correct answer in Evernote when I find it and then use the chrome extension so that when I re-google it, I see it in my Evernote results.
is difficult. I make manuals in word about installations and write encountered errors and solutions. If something is short I use my blog so I can use it online. Save bookmarks but now they are a lot and never need to use it again or they deleted the web post. My fast resource is remember how to re-googling, besides can help to find updated solutions.
How about a Jupyter Notebook? You can mix Markdown and code.