cloud based “knowledge base” approach with links, snippets and excerpts for google chrome

Question

I'm working as a web developer and have lots (hundreds) of links with hacks, tutorials and code snippets that I don't want to memorize. I am currently using evernote to save the content of my links as snippets and have them searchable and always available (even if the source site is down).

I spend a lot of time on tagging, sorting, evaluating and saving stuff to evernote and I'm not quite happy with the outcome. I ended up with a multitude of tags and keep reordering and renaming tags while retagging saved articles.

My Requirements

• web based
• saving web content as snippets with rich styling (code sections, etc.)
• interlinked entries possible
• chrome plugin for access to content
• chrome plugin for content generation
• web app or desktop client for faster sorting / tagging / batch processing
• good and flexible search mechanism
• (bonus) google search integration (search results from KnowledgeBase within google search results)

I had a look at kippt but that doesn't seem to be a solution for me. If I don't find a better solution, I'm willing to stay with evernote as it meets nearly all my needs but I need a good plan to sort through my links/snippets once and get them in order.

Which solutions do you use and how do you manage your knowledge base?

Answer 1

I'm a big Evernote fan but a stern critic of all my tools. I've stuck with Evernote because I'm happy enough with its fundamental information structures. I am, however, currently working on some apps to provide visualisations and hopefully better ways to navigate complex sets of notes.

A few tips, based on years of using Evernote and wiki's for collaboration and software project management:

• you can't get away from the need to curate things, regardless of your tool
• don't over-think using tags, tags in combination with words are a great way to search (you do know you can say tag:blah in a search to combine that with word searches?)
• build index pages for different purposes - I'm using a lot more of the internal note links to treat Evernote like a wiki
• refactor into smaller notebooks if you use mobile clients a lot, allowing you to choose to have different collections of content with you at different times