John Hesch

For some time I’ve been wanting to put together an information manager to organize and catalog my thoughts, ideas, knowledge, code snippets, links, etc. I was reading Paul Allen’s blog where has said

But like some other good habits I have developed over the years which are hard to teach and harder yet to convince others to do (like taking notes at every meeting you attend, and storing all your personal knowledge in a searchable database), I have a very hard time convincing anyone to start their own blog. Most think it would be a waste of time.

I have accumulated quite a bit of information over the years which I store in different places like my computer, my journal, online, notebooks, and email. I need to find a way to organize this information into a searchable database that is easily accessible.

Because the type of information I want to manage is mostly gathered online it makes most sense for me to have my information manager accessible from a browser. I’m very familiar with WordPress so I’m going to turn a WordPress installation into a personal information manager. The benefits of using WordPress are:

1. WordPress is built on PHP and MySQL which I’m familiar with and is licensed under the GPL. I can extend it or modify it in any way I choose.
2. All data is stored in a database which can easily be protected with daily back-ups.
3. Data is searchable.
4. XML-RPC interface makes it easy to add data to my information manager.
5. I can easily password protect the entire publishing system.
6. There are hundreds of plugins to choose from when additional functionality is needed.
7. I can create custom fields, multiple categories, and sub-categories.

If you’re interested in following along and creating your own personal information manager get a copy of WordPress downloaded. You will need the following:

1. PHP version 4.1 or greater
2. MySQL version 3.23.23 or greater
3. Apache with mod_rewrite. You don’t have to use Apache.

Tonight I’ll create a new subdomain called pim.johnhesch.com. I’ll get my WordPress application uploaded onto the newly created subdomain. I’m going to use the February 8th nightly build of WordPress. It will be 1.5 beta but it’s close to being released as stable and should be free of any major bugs. They don’t call it bleeding edge for nothing.

I can’t install WordPress just yet because it will take a few hours for the DNS settings for the new subdomain to propagate throughout the Internet, so after the upload I’m going to search for a minimalistic theme to use. I don’t need a fancy design because I’m the only one that will be viewing and using my PIM. My only requirement is that it’s a clean look. Until I start adding data, the URL will be publicly available in case some of you are following along.

Tomorrow night we’ll install WordPress and the new theme and decide on how we’ll set up the categories and get some required initial plugins installed.