Musings

Redesigning my Evernote – 1 – Basics

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EvernoteAs mentioned in my post “To cloud or not to cloud“, I am trying to figure out if the switch to Evernote from OpenKM will work out for me. One incident that has pushed me to pursue this further, is the recent downtime of my server. The downtime was caused due to getting a new IP address, and as I was on holiday at the time, there was nothing I could do about it, as I was not able to reach anything at home. Now, if you suddenly want, or need, to look something up, this is not a very handy situation.

So, I am thinking that I want to make the switch, however: there is stuff to plan. As mentioned before, my current folder/organizational structure looks a bit like this:

  • Me
    • Company1
      • 2014
    • Company2
      • 2014
        • Bills
        • Correspondence
    • Company##
  • Evelien
    • Company##
      • 2014
  • Shared
    • Company##
      • 2014

Well, I think you get how it goes. So, this then begs the question: what would be the best way to convert this into an Evernote system that works, for me.
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Starting a blog is the easy part… 1

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start…it is the maintaining bit that gets you every time 🙂

Over the past few weeks, I have been working on some posts and scheduled them to be posted, which went swimmingly. However, then you hit the point where the “easiest” ideas have been worked out and put into writing, and then you hit the point where you know you should write something, but you don’t know what you want to write about. Which is not entirely true again, because there are enough ideas going around in my head, but most of these need some time to evolve into a useful blog post.

Also, another thing that is making it hard to “decide” what to write about, is the question “what do I WANT to share?”. For instance: I have made a category for Formula 1, as that is something that I think about and would like to write about, but then I think “who could be interested in my opinion”? In the end, it actually doesn’t really matter, as it is my blog, and I can write about whatever I want, but still, there is this “hurdle” to overcome. The hurdle is nothing more than a psychological barrier, but getting past that is not as easy as it seems. At least, for me.

Anyhow, to keep things going, you do need to get some content out regularly, and in my case, I (try to) do this every Tuesday, with the occasional extra bit in between scheduled posts. I cannot guarantee that this will be the case forever, but the least I can do is my best.

Luckily for me, just by writing this post over the past few days, I have found some new ideas that I can write about and are currently in draft, so hopefully I can work these out properly to be able to fill a few weeks worth of content.

And as you may have realized by now, this post was just created to make sure the weekly cycle will not be broken, and to see if I can go past the Hurdle 😉

To cloud or not to cloud? 1

This entry was posted in Tech and tagged Musings Paperless Tech on by

CloudThese days, there are a plethora of cloud apps available that claim to make your life easier, give you more storage, and pretty much do everything you want (well, a lot, at least). One of the first, widely adopted, cloud services was of course Hotmail, which no longer exists, but has now become Outlook.com, and we must not forget Yahoo Mail either in this regard, as that was the main competitor for Hotmail at the time. Nowadays, both have been surpassed in number of users by GMail.

However, email is not the only thing you can get in the cloud. Pretty much anything you want, you can now do in the cloud, like doing your office work with Microsoft Office Online or Google Docs, take notes with Evernote, keep track of your to-do’s with Wunderlist or Remember the Milk, or storing files with Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Box.net, listen to music via Spotify, SoundCloud or Google Play Music, and a whole number of other things.

With all the options available, and all the comforts they bring, it is easy to get your head in the clouds (pun intended) and get overwhelmed with all the options, passwords and URLs and such. For instance: I used to store my bookmarks and passwords in Xmarks, but after they got taken over by LastPass, I had to bring my passwords over to their service, which was fine at the time. The advantage was that LastPass filled in all passwords in both FireFox and Chrome, and it was always up-to-date. XMarks gave some trouble with syncing my bookmarks between browsers, so, at one point, I decided to get rid of that and use Chrome’s built in sync, which works fine.

My passwords were still synced by LastPass and I was fine with that, until the moment that I realized that I was keeping double records, as I also store all my passwords in KeePass. I keep my KeePass file in my Dropbox, so that I have the most recent version of all the passwords available on any device I use. As I am not too enthusiastic on keeping a double administration, I figured it was time to say goodbye to LastPass, as it cannot be used on my phone, without paying for it, and KeePass is free on every device.

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