21 Apr 2003 | g said...

Ummmm....How about keeping a web server running at your office? Certainly, you guys have at least a DSL equivalent pipe running into there. During my later years in college, I noticed many of my professors stopped coming to class with briefcases. Most of them started showing up with nothing at all. They would just keep a web server running in their office and take advantage of the fact that the campus was wired everywhere.

21 Apr 2003 | JF said...

Don, stay tuned. I'm working on a solution for you. It was almost ready for release a few months ago, but I got sidetracked. Stay tuned!

21 Apr 2003 | Joshua Kaufman said...

Wow, Jason. Sounds exciting. How soon are you expecting to release it?

21 Apr 2003 | Don Schenck said...

g -- I do have a web server, but I don't want to spend the money on something like SharePoint. I'm cheap.

Until I get more clients, I have to live hand-to-mouth, week-to-week, paycheck-to-paycheck and other hyphenated types of cliches.

21 Apr 2003 | kev said...

wtf is sharepoint? and cant it be pirated? anyway, as long as you have a static IP, and ( even if you don't) you should be able to set up filesharing services over IP. an industrial-strength webserver isn't needed, just plain-old filesharing. although if you're on windows i suppose this is some kind of security risk, but what isn't on your lopsided OS.

21 Apr 2003 | Don Schenck said...

kev -- point is, I want search capabilities in addition to storage.

At this point, an FTP server would probably work, now that I think about it.

21 Apr 2003 | Moe said...

Hey Don, let us know what you end up using.

21 Apr 2003 | yuckmouth said...

I was going to suggest just FTP - or perhaps a pocket firewire drive.

21 Apr 2003 | hurley#1 said...

I use a laptop ;-)

Everything stays there so my files travel with me. Old stuff gets archived onto CDs and zip disks, but with the 30 gigabyte+ hard drives that are shipping with laptops these days you don't even have to archive much.

Sometimes when I know I'll be traveling somewhere where I don't want to bring my laptop, I'll put my current project files on a QuickPlace (Lotus/IBM) or in my .Mac documents folder so I can access them from the Web. QuickPlace is searchable, but you have to work for someone who has the software in order to create your own QuickPlace. It would be great if there were a service that rented out QuickPlace space for individuals.

I'm also curious to see what Jason has up his sleeve...I think there's a big niche out there for an efficient and easy-to-use solution to the problem that Don describes.

21 Apr 2003 | eliot said...

I'm a big fan of WebDAV. There are servers for pretty much any OS (plus a module for Apache), and a plethora of clients. Of course it is all free.

The really nice thing is that once it is setup, XP and OS X have it built in and make the shared points act just like authenticated SMB shared folders. I just set up a few folders for my family and I to share files -- they were able to follow my simple directions for XP and plop files on within a few minutes. When I don't have a WebDAV client, I just go to the HTTP address and after asking for my login information, it shows a directory listing like any normal directory.

21 Apr 2003 | Darrel said...

> kev -- point is, I want search capabilities in addition to storage.

If you are a MS fan, just run the indexserver against your files. Far from perfect, but free if you're already running an MS web server.

I really need to get the hand of WebDAV one of these days...

21 Apr 2003 | Smiler said...

Of course these online systems for document storage are so very useful but what about when their server goes down, you want to get at a 60mb file and you only have a modem available....

I think either a PDA with 1gb microdrive is a good solution, limited res admittedly.. or those usb dongles or a teeny laptop etc...

21 Apr 2003 | ~bc said...

dotMac includes the "iDisk" which is a WebDAV stoage solution, and it works cross platform. If you need more than the standard 100mb capacity, it's easy to upgrade. Best of all, you don't need your own server (you use Apple's, which are backed up nightly). Of course you can't use the backup and anti-virus stuff if you don't use Mac, but you get everything else, all of which are very useful. There's a 60 day free trial of it, too, at mac.com... Can't beat "free" (trial)!

21 Apr 2003 | scott said...

I've been using remote desktop connection on windows xp. then it's like sitting at your computer and It can be accecssed from any windows 98 + machine. If you don't have xp pro you can downlaod tightvnc to do the same thing. either way all you need is the ip of your computer and login/password

21 Apr 2003 | jharr said...

Are you running IIS or Apache? There are some nice open source asset management solutions for PHP/MySQL available on sourceforge. Nice for file upload, search and organization.

There are also some nice solutions that would allow you to share with clients, although I'd hesitate to unless you want to spend the time making them more usable.

I work on a beta team developing on the new version of Sharepoint, it's quite awsome but a little too much (money & overhead) for just a couple of people.

22 Apr 2003 | Andrew said...

I'd suggest just picking up a cheap enclosure and 5400rpm HDD. You could do the two for about CDN$200. Chances are good you have a drive kicking around the office, or your IT friends could hook you up. I recently bought a 7G HDD pull for CDN$60.

24 Apr 2003 | Jason9 said...

Lots of discussion here about storage/transfer options, one thing that I'm really curious about is how to store other types of items into a master system;
Such as;
receipts, tax records, post it notes, articles torn out from esquire, business ideas jotted down on paper, etc.....

This would definitely require a scanner solution - but of what kind?

Also, what about metadata, especially for searching? For example a business idea jotted down on paper could have associated metadata such as data/time/category/links...etc....

Ideas...

24 Apr 2003 | hurley#1 said...

I'm posting way too much these days because work is slow, sorry.

receipts, tax records, post it notes, articles torn out from esquire, business ideas jotted down on paper, etc.....

If you really want to take the time to digitize all that stuff, you can scan them and save as PDFs, and then use Acrobat (the full program, not the Reader) to combine lots of individual PDFs into a master file, which can then be searched and indexed. You can add keywords and other metadata (subject and author) to the individual PDFs as well, and you can define custom data fields if you want to enhance the searchability.

An alternative approach, which I used for a while for filing magazine articles and research papers, is to keep paper files but tie them to a database. I set up the database to assign consecutive record numbers to each entry: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. Then everytime I wanted to file something away, I'd create a record for it with keywords and other metadata, put it in a manilla folder with the record number on it, and file it away. That meant I didn't have to do any kind of hierarchical organizing of my paper files. No need to ponder which subject folder a particular article should go in, it just received a unique record number. Whenever I needed to find a particular file, or to find everything I had on a particular subject, I just searched the database and went to my file cabinet to pull out the numbered folders that were listed in the search. It worked flawlessly, except when the electricity was down.

26 Apr 2003 | Doug said...

If you are on a Mac with OS-X, the winners are:

Note Taker by Aquaminds

or

Notebook by Circus Ponies.

Just drop you stuff (email, notes, outlines, docs, multimedia, links, etc.) on a notebook page and it gets automagically indexed and packaged in the most usable manner imaginable.

Not free, but amazingly worth every cent. This is a whole new way of looking at "stuff". Note Taker even publishes to a website. Notebook does pdf files, but html output is in the works.

27 Apr 2003 | hurley#1 said...

TidBITS just did a review of Note Taker, and reading it I couldn't get over the impression that this program is a solution searching for a problem. It seemed like everything that it does can already be accomplished by other software that comes free with your OS-X Mac (address book, AppleWorks, etc.). The author of the review was all excited about how Note Taker can be used to do outlines (but AppleWorks does just fine with that) and adding information about your contacts (but the Address Book lets you add searchable fields for whatever you want), so I guess I'm a little mystified about what makes Note Taker so great?

04 Nov 2003 | Osoyoos said...

16 Jan 2004 | Hector said...

This topic is one we will tackle later in this article, but it refers to making sure that your application and the dock aren't fighting it out for supremacy of the screen.

16 Jan 2004 | Lucretia said...

This topic is one we will tackle later in this article, but it refers to making sure that your application and the dock aren't fighting it out for supremacy of the screen.