Show HN: FAQT – A lightweight, personal knowledge base | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: FAQT – A lightweight, personal knowledge base

faqt.co

184 pointssiavosh110 comments

For those who are wondering how the styling looks, I signed up and copy-pasted a markdown sample here: https://app.faqt.co/share/k6hs7l

This looks pretty cool. I think I'l be using this from now on. Features I'd like to see in the future:

- custom domain (esp for teams, which I see is in the works)

- Revision History

- Exports/Backups

- Searching

- Raw markdown support. I often like to copy markdown from places, and this would come handy. Just a .md at the end of the route would do.

- API support is always nice

Also, while you are working at a team solution, you might want to take a look at this blog post [0] from xoxco, where they describe their knowledge base that integrates very well with slack.

[0]: https://medium.com/why-not/our-slack-wiki-e4f6d23a3495

Yeah, I can't put the time in to enter stuff into a proprietary codebase until there is the ability to export or a api to allow me to write my own export.

This is helpful, thanks for sharing. We've struggled with where to integrate with first as most integrations I've seen have been gratuitous, but #slack is a solid possibility. Curious about the API support, how would you use it?

While I do have a _drafts directory for my blog under version control, editing it locally is a pain. What I'd like to do:

- write the blog post drafts under a `Drafts` category at faqt - Run a script that fetches all drafts and commits them in my drafts repo when I run it

That way, my repo stays updated, and I don't have to worry about copying-pasting updates there. I could even write a "publish-from-faqt-to-blog" script that detects a category change from "Drafts" to "Published" and handles that for me.

Would you be considering front-matter yaml support. If you add that, tagging+searching things would become so much better. (Every doc gets its own set of properties).

Also, if you give us an API, we can make more integrations ourselves. That is one of the main reasons behind Slack's success.

For such a use-case Contentful[0] might be viable solution.

[0] https://www.contentful.com

Can you share the markdown sample? I've never used markdown before, outside of reddit (I think), and I'd like to use this sample as a reference.

I copied it from http://www.unexpected-vortices.com/sw/rippledoc/quick-markdo...

A quick follow up: we just released the export functionality where you can download all of your markdown with one click anytime. Let us know if you have any thought or questions.

Thanks a lot.

How can a website / service be operated in 2015 without any contact or legal information? How am I supposed to use this for my personal information without being able to read the privacy statements or knowing who's operating the service to what purpose?

Edit: To make the reason for my comment clear, there was no link in the footer like there is now at the time I wrote it.

Not to mention some jurisdictions requiring a privacy policy, like California.

http://www.faqt.co/terms-of-service.html may be enough?

The link in the footer has just been added and wasn't there when I wrote my comment.

Nope. Has to be linked from the homepage, among other requirements.

http://leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=bpc&group=...

What is the consequences of ignoring this if you are outside of California?

If any user of the service is in California, then the state can potentially take legal action against you.

Whether this really matters to a particular company depends on where they are, but full-faith-and-credit means that at a minimum anyone based in the US has to worry about it.

Has the State of California ever taken legal action against any company located outside of CA for not complying with this regulation or is it just another one of those laws that are on the book but are never enforced?

Believe it or not, the online world doesn't revolve around California or the European Union.

One of the best "features" of the internet is that it is jurisdictionally grey.

Otherwise, why not just subject the entire world to the stringent requirements of China?

While it's true that it may not be a legal requirement (in some jurisdictions) to post a privacy policy, it's probably not a good idea to trust a service without one, particularly if said service is designed for posting potentially private personal information.

In other words: They should post a privacy policy - not because it's a legal requirement (though it may be) - but because it's good business. And no one will trust them otherwise.

Serious question: Do people treat privacy policies any different than EULA's? (To wit: Abstruse legalese that doesn't really tell anyone anything?)

I can summarize 95% of privacy policies right here:

    * We won't sell your info (directly)
    * We "may" provide your info to third parties based on ill-defined criterion
    * We can change this at any time without telling you first
    * If we get bought (which is likely), this is all rendered invalid
    * If we break our word here, your recourse is precisely jack

I trust no privacy policy. Once something is online, it's no longer under my control. So it's either for public use, or it's securely encrypted.

So, good observation in the abstract, but: 1) you're responding to someone who said "some jurisdictions" 2) siavosh's Twitter profile suggests that they're in San Francisco.

I'm sure there a lot of strange requirements in random states of India, China, Russia, Egypt, etc as well.

Yep, was meaning to add that in, added!

As someone who recently launched a service — among a zillion things you have to do to deploy a software application online this one seems markedly less important, especially if you are launching an MVP on a small budget.

If your MVP won't fly, legal info won't help and is a waste of time and resources. If it will, you can always add it in the future. The percentage of people who will complain or not use the service at all without reading the Terms of Use first is… well, I have no idea what it is, but let's just say it won't move the needle.

Contact information is more important, and easy to add, so it should be there.

Another "write your text here" and nothing more app.

I'm not questioning the usefulness of this, but why do we have so many simple apps like these? People writing code to do the same thing over and over again, aren't you bored?

Because people have slightly differing taste and opinion about how such an app should work and what it should look like. And because it has a relatively clear scope, many people actually build them.

evernote kind of apps don't work. Except Google Keep. Keep kinda works.

The only problem is that Google dont keep services alive.

What warrant us that Faqt.co is still alive next week? Nothing. Every service on the Internet can be shut down. Google services are as long online as Google profit from them.

Faqt.co could as well yes, but google has quit a history of closing down small services.

> Google services are as long online as Google profit from

How do the profit from Keep?

Faqt.co could as well yes, but google has quit a history of closing down small services.

After years of service, and with months of warning and a tool to export your data. Keep's predecessor (Notebook) lasted 6 years. Reader lasted 8. Orkut lasted 10. How many startups live for that long? How many don't suddenly shut down, leaving you stranded?

Don't get too attached. Keep is being discontinued in the next few months. Something better is replacing it, eventually, but just keep that in mind.

I was unable to find anything that suggests this. Are you speculating?

Probably speculating given the lifetime of most small-scale Google apps.

Could be that, could be a troll, could be an actual Googler (355 Main Street is Google's address in Cambridge MA)

How so?

If no one ever re-invented the wheel our cars would still be rolling on stone wheels.

Cars never rolled on stone wheels. Flintstones was a cartoon, not a documentary.

Cars never rolled on stone wheels because someone had reinvented the wheel by that time which I'm pretty sure was the point of the parent comment.

> Flintstones was a cartoon, not a documentary.

Go ahead and shatter my illusions, why don't you.

Comments like this belong on reddit. This is an information sharing website.

This is great!

A boss at an old job used to track little nuggets of information in a Word Doc he called his "Master" file. It had everything from bugs he had discovered with rare microcontrollers, to short reviews of meals he ordered at restaurants. (The idea behind the meals reviews is that the next time he went to the restaurant, he could look up what he had last time and decide if he wanted to have it again, or try something different)

I never could get as hardcore into this 'knowledge logging' thing, but I've been interested in a tool like this for a while now.

That's exactly what I did that led to this--a master google document that quickly became impossible to use or maintain. I wrote a quick blog post about it: http://blog.faqt.co/post/121242652146/a-note-app-to-replace-...

Well, consider me a user. Is this a side-project for you, or are you going to build a company around it? Naturally, I'd like to know that if I enter my data in here, I'll be able to export a copy of it in the unfortunate event that you have to shut down the service.

Thanks, we're hoping to build something lasting, but that's a fair question. A group of my co-workers, friends, and family use it everyday, and the last thing we'd do is disrespect that trust. I use the site everyday for my own work, and if we ever have to cease service, be sure that we'd have a free export function. It's an MVP right now, so there's plenty of things we'd like to add. Also feel free to reach out to us directly at hello@faqt.co

> if we ever have to cease service, be sure that we'd have a free export function.

...and open up the source under a proper open-source license, I'd hope?

The best tool I have found is ConnectedText. It's not perfect, but it does the job. It's basically a full-featured wiki in a desktop application, with alright query capabilities baked into the markup language. Also a really good category system. I use it pretty much exactly like your boss used his "master file".

For example I have a page called "Reading Log" whose content is:

  [[$SUMMARY:[$PR Read <> ""]|-Read|Rating|Author|Type]]

This is a query that finds any pages with the "Read" property and then produces a table with all the stuff I have read, in descending order of reading date, along with the rest of the properties listed. Unfortunately the query language is not particularly powerful, some things I've wanted to do have not been possible.

What additional things have you wanted to xo?

One of the major omissions is that there is no "GROUP BY" equivalent. For example I wanted to generate a table with average book rating grouped by author, but it wasn't possible.

Why not just use Access (I suppose LibreOffice has an equivalent too)? It probably would be more work to set up, but you would have a proper database with the ability to use SQL for queries.

Sounds interesting ! And quite funny since I was looking for something similar last week (and didn't find anything really fitting what I want).

A couple of questions :

- do you have any kind of versioning/revision history ? Especially on the individuals "facts"

- do you have a search function ? How does it work ?

- Any kind of tagging system apart from the color code ?

- any way to export the raw data ?

- any plan of an API otherwise ?

- like other have mentioned, it's a bit of a touchy area, I'm fine with hosting it if it means I can access it from anywhere and I know my data is not sold some way or some other, but my 3nd point would be at least one thing to worry less if it would ever go down. Which leads me on my last point : What's your business model ?

PS: Anyone else @HN that knows of something similar ? (apart from evernote)

Edited for styling

notepad.cc tiddlywiki.com keep.google.com ...

http://alternativeto.net/software/tiddlywiki/

http://trello.com

I see trello more like a super TODO list, not so much as a repository of knowledge !

Does anyone use it that way ?

Thanks, and good questions. Here's a first pass:

- Not yet: But I'm a big fan of Rich Hickey's thoughts on data and time if that gives any clues on where I'd like to take it (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Values)

- Search function is very light just a client side search of the titles, but if people want it we'll probably build a server side full text search

- We've been debating different tagging schemes and actually built one out already but decided not to include it in the MVP until we get more feedback (let us know hello@faqt.co)

- Not yet, but we do want to build at least a minimal export functionality to give everyone peace of mind

- No API plans

- It's something we have to feel out, but it's followed closely my own use case where I need to store some information that I constantly refer to; self hosted is a thought but that automatically rules out most casual users. We'll see...

Can't use this without full-text search... it's a shame. I was looking for something more pretty than Tomboy Notes, but so far nothing is beating it.

there's simplenote, which is multi platform. Im waiting for markdown support on Android (it's there on iOS).

Evernote, DEVONthink, and Google Docs are the big players.

There's also: http://are.na/, http://pinterest.com, http://www.dropmark.com/, https://kippt.com/, https://pinboard.in/, Wordpress or Tumblr (with the right theme) and there are 5+ more projects in this space announced over the past year of which I was aware at one time, but sadly I lost track of the list.

Not to mention, http://etherpad.org/ / http://piratepad.net, https://hackpad.com/, http://notepad.cc/, http://socrates.io/, http://quip.com, http://simplenote.com/, https://www.penflip.com/, http://snippi.com/ and the like share similar features.

wow, thanks! Since you're obviously interested and curated a list, could you share your choice?

Unfortunately there's no one application that does it all. I use Google Docs for collaborative document editing with various teams I work with, Arena for collecting bookmarks, embeds, and images (some of that activity is collaborative), Evernote for collecting and synthesizing ideas (also sometimes collaborative), Trello for high-level project management, OmniFocus as a personal task manager / universal inbox for ideas, references, etc., and I was using Ulysses (and Daedelus for iPhone) as a kind of journal / space for thinking through ideas, but I'm slowly migrating that over to Evernote.

This is macosx only but give DevonThink a go:

http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/overvie...

with the office version you get web access, hence accessable from anywhere.

I'll definitely check this out.

I currently use Google docs...usually the title of the doc in the form of a question where the doc is the answer.

The search varies in terms of accuracy from revision to revision.

> Anyone else @HN that knows of something similar ? (apart from evernote)

I'm currently experimenting with Emacs org-mode, Microsoft OneNote and a personal MediaWiki install on localhost. My observations so far:

- Emacs org-mode: (+) integrated power of my Emacs setup, (+) great key bindings, (+) based on text files, (-) difficult to learn, (-) no fancy UI, drag-n-drop

- Microsoft OneNote: (+) nice UI, (+) good mouse support, (+) drag-n-drop, (-) proprietary format, (-) no LaTeX

- MediaWiki: (+) rich wiki capabilities, (+) great revision management, (+) available in local network on any device, (+) everything in the browser, (-) painful updating, migrating, installing, (-) slow, no good keybindings

My conclusion so far: I'm torn between MediaWiki and org-mode. OneNote is a bit too proprietary for my taste. Next I’m going to move everything to org-mode and work on ways to publish my notes with LaTeX markup on the intranet and to include pictures more easily.

A feature from OneNote I love and nobody knows about because of poor marketing is the "me@onenote.com" [1]. You send an email to it, it creates a note where Email subject = Note title, and email content = the note text

I linked my gmail account to it (it doesn't require to sync email between the gmail and the outlook account) and I email "me@onenote.com" all the time.

If you just put a URL in the subject of your email, OneNote will create a note with the HTML page extracted (so it's fully searchable) as well as a screenshot of the page!

[1] https://blogs.office.com/2014/03/17/email-your-notes-into-on...

Have you tried Tiddliwiki? (http://tiddlywiki.com/), single file wiki, used it for a few years is fantastic

" Next I’m going to move everything to org-mode and work on ways to publish my notes with LaTeX markup on the intranet and to include pictures more easily."

Unless you're intending to put pdf's on your intranet, seems like org-mode's export to html would be better suited to what you want. You may also want to check the org-mode support for Jekyll, the ruby-based static-html blog engine.

OneNote has TeX support. If you make an equation, you can type in TeX and it will render.

Personally I'd suggest a self-hosted instance of Moin Moin Wiki (https://moinmo.in/)

If you want something open source and a bit more powerful, covering everything you've asked for and more, check out my product: http://haplo.org

It's more designed for use within an organisation rather than individuals, but works very nicely for small numbers of users. And as it has a plugin API, you can extend it easily.

How can something which is _personal_ and supposed to be _lightweigth_ a web site? Do i understand right that my data is hosted on their servers? Oh well...

Exactly what excited and then disappointed me. It's a great idea, but I think making it a service will make some people uncomfortable with natural use cases (ex: diary?) for a tool like this. I have been working on something (probably simpler than, but similar) like this that would be self-hosted, mostly because there's a lot of stuff I didn't want to store on Trello or other "cloud" knowledgebase tools. The markdown editing view from the product page is almost exactly what I was aiming for, so I really like it :)

Honestly I'm not even comfortable with my work interactions being stored on Slack. I would never use a service like this for personal info.

I think a web site is totally okay for this kind of application. Nowadays, I have always a browser open.

But a self-hosted version, for people whom privacy is important, would be great. Are there any self-hosted alternatives? Especially with a nice markdown editor...

I wrote a self-hosted tool that fills this need for me. Been using it since 2008. Content is written in markdown, though it doesn't have a fancy editor. Supports tagging and searching too. Since you mentioned self-hosted, I thought you might be interested.

Screenshot: http://greaterscope.net/files/tracker.png Github project: https://github.com/alanszlosek/tracker

Personal means it's not enterprise.

Lightweight means not a lot of features.

Why the hell are people so nitpicky

Congrats on the launch! Your main competitor here is Evernote so I would highly recommend you implement a "Import from Evernote" feature, or at least tout it.

I'm happy with Evernote but the main disgruntle I have is the lack of Markdown capability, which you're making very clear, and any other developer-friendly features. There could be a big opportunity here if you can segregate yourself from Evernote by niche-ing yourself towards developers and technical folk. There's definitely a void here.

The frontpage design is nice, I can see the value - currently I'd use workflowy for small pieces of information like this.

I think you're missing a trick by not having any of your example's linked to an actual FAQT - those 8 boxes should link to shared examples, even the link in the share field at the bottom 404's :(

For some reason, I have expected it to be installable on my own hardware, not SaaS. That's the kind of personal I am looking for right now.

for those interested in an even more lightweight version of this and have zsh open all the time, I wrote a small zsh function that has proven to be invaluable. basically all you do is type mm <tab> and then it lists all your files inside the personal "man" folder inside your home directory. basically ~/man/manpages/filename and you can create files easily that was too. by just typing `mm newfilename` and it will open up vi to that new file. no server at all and it works just dandy for notes and the like.

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/b751aee935dd7892e049

edit: you could probably make it a git directory and have a daemon watching that folder for changes and when changes happen you could have it commit that. just a thought.

I can't edit it anymore but you need to edit your .zshrc file and put that in there. It's probably pretty basic but I thought I should say it. also, this is a good script to show as a template if you wanted to add your own basic tab completion to zsh.

This looks really nice. A small suggestion: Put a video, demo, screenshots or tour on the homepage. I found it kind of hard to visualize how the product actually looks and works from the information you have on your homepage.

And a (well-meaning) question: why would I use this over say trello, or google docs?

Glad you asked, wrote about it here: http://blog.faqt.co/post/121242652146/a-note-app-to-replace-...

Cool stuff. Would love to have "memorable urls" or wiki like [[Title becomes link]] syntax so I can build out a lightweight, personal faqtiki - Currently one needs to get the share link and do a [page](share url) to accomplish it (a multi-step non-memorable way)

You really need a demo on the homepage.

For ex: you should remove the need to signup to use it first, let them create a FAQ, then signup to save it to a particular account.

Nice! And here's a speech interface that lets FAQT users load notes by voice command from Chrome, Android, or Android Wear. (Voice commands, like FAQT notes, can be shared.)

https://goo.gl/1VwtE1

FAQT from a smartwatch: https://goo.gl/OBz6tA

Haven't people been doing this for a long time? Maintaining and categorizing their pieces of personal knowledge - in files?

I personally don't understand, why such a tool need to exist. I thought humanity solved this problem the day we started to write down things. From stones, to papyrus, to personal diaries, and now to personal files on personal disks on personal laptops/desktops.

I don't understand, why suddenly someone would want to put their personal knowledge base on someone else's database (the cloud - their servers - whatever)!

Why is this even worth it? Just because you can render your knowledge pretty (with nice font, big and bold headers and images)?

I don't know how you guys think of this, but putting personal stuff into the cloud, aka others' computer, without encryption is not looking so personal to me.

For those looking for an opensource / self hosted alternative, for the past year i've been using MarkdownPages.

https://github.com/unicate/markdownpages

Backend is just a folder full of markdown files and has search as well.

See http://unicate.ch/markdownpages Password: demo

Great idea, and I would like to use such a service. One thing - you may want to address the issue of asking for a password on the home page registration form over a non-secure connection.

It wasn't until I hunted for a secure form via the 'Login' link that I knew I could sign up without risk of my credentials being sniffed.

What's the benefit of this over something like Google Keep or Evernote?

One thing I think could be interesting is if you let me own my data; not in A ToS, but actually let me host my data: Either in my own MySQL instance or Google Drive/Dropbox[0].

[0]Yes, I understand that with a service like Drive/Dropbox I don't own my data.

Really cool. A couple of things I'd like to see would be:

- Change the window title to something other than 'Dashboard', and add a favicon.

- Give me a way to get my data out. Dropbox syncing would be great - a folder for each category, and sync .md files into the folders. (Two way syncing would be even better)

I'm developing a small tool that covers the same use case.

There is not as much features, but it's open source and self hosted.

https://github.com/jchampemont/notedown

I installed dokuwiki on a raspberry pi and forwarded port 80 through my router so I can access it from anywhere and send links to others.

Oh and there's a dns entry setup using duckdns.org, which is free, although I did send them a small donation (in bitcoin!).

Same here: dokuwiki on a cubieboard and dynamic dns. Very pleased with that solution!

I like this. Critiques / suggestions:

* Esc should close a modal (hit "+", then hit Esc)

* On that note, more keyboard shortcuts would be great

* #hashtags should be recognized and linked in notes, or some other way of easily linking concepts together should be available

"human knowledge is cumulative" implement this idea by encouraging users to make public posts, then other users could search through them and fork them, this will be very good

Front page is not behind ssl and you can sign up from there. It's easy to change form action target to a malicious url with a simple mitm attack.

Ok since nobody asked.. What is the tech stack behind?

DO NOT USE IT FOR ANYTHING IMPORTANT.

It just can't save Unicode characters, anything Unicode will turn to question mark ???????? junk.

Hi Livid, just sent you an email. Unicode is now supported, thanks again for pointing this out.

siavosh, this looks great - I think this would be super useful for a team (especially with slack integration), are you or will you be looking for beta testers for a corporate solution?

Definitely, please send us your contact information: hello@faqt.co

i tried the share link at the bottom of the page and it doesnt work. probably because im not logged in? Idk i was expecting a demo :)

cheers. was looking for an app like this a few weeks back as well.

So, given that it's free, what is the business model?

This looks great but it's 100% a UI sell.

a favicon would be nice. It's easier to locate the tab that way especially when it's pinned. (firefox users)

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