Show HN: Archivy – Self-hosted knowledge base embedded into your filesystem
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This looks interesting, nice integration with Elasticsearch as well. However, I see and have tried tools like this several times in the past (tiddlywiki, org-brain, etc.) and haven't been able to stay on it, always reverting to paper, or, more recently, reMarkable tablet notebooks. Is it just me or it requires quite a bit of motivation and dedication to stick to it?
Shows that user contribution to a platform can be part of its success.
Judging the marketing here, not the product. Never used it.
Now that I'm in my 40s, I don't care as much about recording information I encounter (other than for work). If it's worth knowing, I can look it up again. If not, ignorance is bliss.
I tend to keep a notes file precisely because it's such a pain to look up some things. If I want to know the exact set of qemu options that I want, for instance, I would have to piece things together from the man page, and/or try things from a half-dozen different blogs, most of which will be incompatible with each other or the version of qemu I'm using (in fairness, qemu networking options have changed a lot over time as they improve things; this might be an extreme example). Or, I could open my notes file, type /qemu<cr>, and grab one of a handful of commands that I already have composed and be done.
Paper outlasts everything. Easy to organize spatially, sketch things, recompile notes, put many pages visible at once, decorate the walls... Unimportant papers end up on archive stacks with little effort.
Recently started using a synced folder with plain Word documents, though, alongside the paper. For writing the more elaborate drafts, and mobile note taking.
I have my tiddlywiki hosted on a server that I can reach from any computer ( work, home, phone, etc. )
So the only barrier to use it, is opening a new tab and typing some notes. The bigger the barrier between brain thought and writing something down, the lower the likelihood of usage.
To be fair, sometimes I'm even too lazy to open a new tab and add an entry in my wiki. I haven't solved this problem yet.
A) doesn't embrace the same idea of building your own digital garden that holds nt only your notes but also automatically syncs with different services like hn, pocket etc to save your digital presence locally.
B) Flexibility of search. Archivy uses elastic search with a neat nlp pipeline to process data and allow it to be searched with accuracy. This is all configured in elastic-search.json and the user can configure it to his needs as he pleases.
C) Ease of use and minimal interface. Archivy has a simple direct UI and its goal is NOT to become a note taking app nor does it pretend to.
You can directly search at the top and then you have a tree view of your data organised in folders.
How does something sync with HN? Running tiddlywiki as a service means it's always "in sync". It is easily extensible with browser addons if you want. It most certainly embraces the idea of building your own garden. People have done incredible things with tiddlywiki.
>> B) Flexibility of search. Archivy uses elastic search with a neat nlp pipeline to process data and allow it to be searched with accuracy. This is all configured in elastic-search.json and the user can configure it to his needs as he pleases.
Elastic search seems like such an overkill for a personal wiki/note taking app. Even for incredibly large wikis. With proper tagging ( and even without ) you will be surprised how fast tiddlywiki search is. And also, for a personal wiki, I would want the least amount of dependencies. I really don't want to have to set up and keep up to date elastic search.
>> C) Ease of use and minimal interface. Archivy has a simple direct UI and its goal is NOT to become a note taking app nor does it pretend to.
"Archivy is a self-hosted knowledge repository". That's the same goal as tiddlywiki. They both have a simple and minimal UI, although I agree Archivy looks more minimal. But I think that's because Archivy offers much less features.
> If you add bookmarks, their webpages contents' will be saved to ensure that you will always have access to it
b) It's not inline with the idea of archiving things you care about. If you don't control it you can't rely on it. You definitely can't rely on wayback machine to always exist. Someone's got to keep paying for those servers and it's not a huge profit center, and there have been questions regarding its survival before because of lack of money.
that's not very interesting because when I find an interesting read I rarely bookmark it. For me bookmarks are links that I visit often.
> b)
that is a fair point, however I think the wayback way is still not too shabby an idea. It ensures there's a copy snapshotted just in case, and yes it might not last forever but it's done a fantastic job so far so not trusting it now just because it'll not survive sounds a minor risk imho.
see https://github.com/Uzay-G/archivy/blob/master/main/templates...
it's just a form where you paste the URL of the site you're interested.
Lots of us use Pinboard.in or similar "bookmark" services. They aren't "Browser bookmarks" they're just forms in some separate app too. We find them more useful than browser bookmarks. The pasting can easily be worked around with a simple bookmarklet.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
When I read the description of Archivy, I had the same impression (it somehow captures the action of bookmarking).
So I looked at the code to see how it was done, and in fact, as you said, it's more like a local pinboard/similar "bookmark" services.
No real point to make, just clarify what 'bookmark' it was.
This is plaintext markdown files. You can easily integrate git with it which will provide a timestamp and cryptographic proof that the contents are unchanged.
That stuff won’t fit the “markdown with a header” format too well, unfortunately. Would probably need to add a SQLite or DuckDB [0] storage engine.
Instead of elastic search you could also use SQLite5 with its full text search support.
I think the Elasticsearch dependency is overkill, specifically because it precludes deployment on a corporately-managed computer where you can run Python but not Elasticsearch.
It would be great to have an option to use a pure python search tool like Woosh [0]. This would trade away some search power for significant portability gains. I might do a fork for this!
It'd be nice to have those two choices.
Kudos. Very good job.
* obsidian is a proprietary piece of software so you can't rely on it for long term archival. There's zero guarantee the company that makes it will exist next year and keep updating it to work with new operating systems.
* obsidian doesn't download page contents
* obsidian doesn't handle bookmarks in any notable way.
While they both use markdown, and can store notes the similarity pretty much ends there.
sure, you've got your core data, but now you've got to recreate obsidian if you want it to work the way you've become accustomed to, and presumably like since you would have used it long enough for this to be a concern.
exporting your data is great, but it's only the beginning. For example: I can export my data from twitter too. It doesn't mean I still have a functional way to share short text thoughts, or the history of them, with their responses linked to other user's accounts or functional way to show all my tweets with a tag or or or ...