As a researcher, you soon start wondering if you had centralized all your notes, possibly digitized them, life would be much better. Recently when I had to make a tough choice of leaving all my notes from years when I am about to shift country (due to limited air travel baggage), I wish I had them on computer. Since I will be making more notes in the future, at least a lesson is learnt.

For this reason, I started experimenting with different available tools. I tried Evernote, Catch.com, Microsoft Onenote and various personal wikis. Initially, I liked MS Onenote. Since it has several useful tools and very easy to use ‘capturing methods’. Later, I realized having it online would be more beneficial as I will be able to access it from anywhere and perhaps share it with friends/colleague if needed.

Then I started experimenting with several ‘wiki’ sites. I tried ‘tiddlywiki‘ – works great, very fluid, no installation, single file. But the idea that all the notes are in single file made me uncomfortable. I realized very soon these notes will be running thousands of pages and all of them in a single file will cause it to load very slowly. Also to have it online, I will have to give higher privileges to the file (so that it can modify the source itself), which I didn’t like. ‘Mediawiki’ (from Wikipedia.org) looked little overkill.

Comparision of various personal wiki services/softwares is given here and here

Long story short, I ended up using Dokuwiki. Great features, many plugins and with little knowledge of php you can customize it with ease. Last but not least, great support for $ \LaTeX $

You can see my installation (link given below), although the Notes are still in nascent stage, but I soon expect it to be full of information and my personal notes, especially in Maths and Computer Science.

My Personal Notebook using Dokuwiki

This also means, I will not be using this blog anymore for personal notes. My initial notes and rough drafts will be in wiki and final and polished articles will be in this blog.