Contexted - text-first personal knowledge manager
Inspired by Sacha's and Christian's work, I searched for the perfect technological implementation for my own web of knowledge. Not being able to find a good fit, my friend and I started working on an application to scratch our own itches. Fast forward half a year: I'm happy to say that we've just launched Contexted.
It is aimed to be a text-first personal knowledge manager, with the focus on building a Wiki-style web of knowledge. It supports Markdown autoformatting, mindmap visualizations and a really frictionless way to connect notes.
First and foremost: I am really curious about the feedback you might have. What do you think of the concept, the user experience and the current features? What would you like to see? Thanks in advance.
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
Hello,
Thanks for this, it looks really interesting. Just be aware you might have a problem with the way you configured the security certificate, because I got an Insecure connection message - I'm at work, and these sites are blocked by our tech team, even if I add an exception to the security certificate. So probably not all interested users will be able to test your tool.
I'll check the site at home and come back with a more detailed feedback.
Thanks!
The questions I'd ask about this are the same ones I'd ask myself about almost any service these days:
1) Once I put stuff into this system, can I get it back out again in a reasonably sane way?
If a service or system is going to lock me in with some proprietary data format, or by not allowing me to export my data easily, I won't use it. One of the reasons I've stuck with plaintext for my notes is there's nothing more portable.
2) Why should I trust this system with my data?
Notes can be extremely personal -- both in the sense of containing a lot of information about my life and me as a person, and in the sense of containing a lot of information about my professional or business life that I don't want to share with everyone. With major companies, I basically assume everything I put into their various services might as well be public, given how little any of them care about my data or my privacy. That same skepticism extends to any online-only service. I need more than just a good-sounding privacy policy -- I'd want good encryption to prevent you from accessing my notes, and I'd ideally want this stuff audited by a third party. Which is a lot to ask, I know!
3) How long do I expect this system to be around?
Even for major companies (like Google and Microsoft), at this point I'm kinda reluctant to rely on them, because they routinely kill off products or modify them beyond recognition. If, for example, I build my workflow around OneNote, and Microsoft decides to kill OneNote because it's not making money or whatever, then I'm screwed. For smaller companies, and individuals, I'm even more reluctant to rely on them totally because they could go out of business (or the author might die!) at any time, and the service or software will disappear. Which leads me to...
4) Can I run my own instance of this system?
I really like the Windows backup tool SyncBack -- it's made by a small company, and I was happy to pay them for it. If they went out of business tomorrow, SyncBack would still work for me, because I have the installer and the key, the software doesn't have to hit some server somewhere to run, and it lives on my local machine. I'd have the time that I needed -- maybe even years -- to find another solution that works as well and replace it. This used to be the primary model of working with software -- you bought it, you installed it, you used it, and that was it. That gave me confidence about buying into software systems, because I knew it'd be around for as long as I could figure out how to run it. The world is mostly SaaS now, and that changes the situation dramatically -- I have way less confidence in trying out these services as a result.
Products like this one come up on, like, Hacker News all the time, and they all seem to have a lifespan of maybe two or three years -- before the company is bought by someone else, or the service fails to grow and is shuttered. When I look for solutions for key workflows like organizing my notes, I want to find something that's rock-solid, and will last for maybe the next ten or even twenty years.
Nothing personal, but boo subscriptions!