Keeping Track of Stuff

Posted 19 January 2007

One of the curses of the computer age, especially for those of us who do development work, is the vast amount of detail that one has to keep track of. Among other things, there’s:

• The sites I like to read regularly
• The sites where there’s some tidbit that I just might want to find again some time
• The usernames and passwords to the dozens of sites I have accounts on
• My to-do lists for various projects
• Commands that I have a hard time remembering for administering my Linux hosting boxes
• Tips on something or other than someone gave me that I mean to follow up on someday

… and so on. I used to deal with all this with a combination of Outlook notes, word documents, post-its, and my increasingly unreliable memory. This all worked reasonably well as long as I stuck to one notebook machine, and one desk, as the center of my life.