We had a Tinderbox meetup yesterday, and there was really nothing on the agenda. A question came up on whether or not Tinderbox could facilitate a certain form of note-taking where one file might hold disparate topics, and later help bring order to them.

The answer is, it can.

Then a question about why not just use a database program? The answer is, why not? Yes, a database program can do the same sort of thing, just in a different way.

My contribution was to suggest that whatever application one chooses, choose it and be done.

I've lived in Tinderbox, imperfectly, incompletely, for more than twenty years. The marmot goes back a decade. Groundhog Day was shorter, 2003-2009. What happened in those four years in between was the loss of Apple's web hosting as part of its .mac, iLife web services. I moved to Tumbler with Day of the Groundhog, and spent about four years there. I left because it felt like it was going the way of Facebook, and decided to finally get my own domain name and web hosting, and return to blogging using Tinderbox.

Today I wish I'd done that in 2009.

The point is, whatever your project is, pick an app and stick with it until it no longer meets your needs. Unless your project is just trying out apps, which is fine too.

I'm by no means a Tinderbox master, but I know enough to get myself in trouble and know enough people to help get me out.

But here's the payoff, at least to me.

I was sure I'd posted something about Yeats in the past, thinking it was about The Second Coming. So I searched for "gyre" in this document, which goes back a decade.

Nada.

Hmmm... Searched for "Yeats." It turns out, I hadn't blogged about The Second Coming, which still feels odd, maybe it was on Twitter. But I had mentioned Yeats back in 2017, nearly 7 years ago.

That's still a happy event, because the piece I linked to in that post is still online, and still worth a read today. Perhaps more so. I read it, and it resonated with David McWilliams' TED talk too.

Despite being of shorter duration, Groundhog Day contains more words than the marmot. I got sucked into Facebook and promoting myself "living my best life" on that miserable platform. Then Twitter took its place. There's a bit of Yeats in that piece that reminds me of Twitter:

Mock mockers after that

Traffic in mockery.

Anyway, as much as I admire the folks who maintain paper notebooks, and I have the blank notebooks to prove it, I wonder how they would find what they thought they may have written about Yeats?

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:16 Monday, 6 November 2023