Personal Knowledge Archive

Goal

This site itself is the project — a place to keep notes, projects, and resources in one durable, low-maintenance archive that I actually keep using, instead of abandoning after a few weeks like most note-taking systems I've tried.

Approach

Every entry is a plain file with a small amount of structure: a title, a date, a category, and a status describing how developed the idea is. Nothing requires a database or an account. If I ever want to move this to a different host, it's a matter of copying files.

What's working

The seedling / growing / evergreen status has been the most useful part of the whole system. It gives me permission to publish something half-formed, which turned out to matter more than any organizational scheme I tried before.

What's still unresolved

Tagging is still fairly loose, and I haven't decided whether to formalize it or let it stay organic. So far, letting it stay a little messy has kept me from spending more time organizing than writing.

Lessons so far

The simplest version of a system is usually the one that survives. Every previous attempt at a personal knowledge base failed at the point where the tooling asked more of me than the writing did.