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Comment by malexw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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