Pile of Index Cards System

Pile of Index Cards System (PoIC)

This is a note taking system using index cards.  I’m copying this down because the original website and wiki for the PoIC system are gone and most other sites just refer to it with a now dead link.

How it works
Hawk describes four types of cards in his system:

The Record Card. He describes it as “a diary, note, account, health, weather, cook, any kind of records about us belongs to this class.” I’d say this is the incoming “stuff” of the day: appointments, notes to follow up on, etc.
The Discover Card. Hawk describes the Discover Card as “Things from my brain, mind, spirit, anything emerge from inside me, are classified into this class.” This is the result of a mind dump. Don’t worry about classifying when filling out a Discover Card. Just get whatever is on your mind out and onto paper.
The GTD Card. Here he combines the title of a project and several actions that pertain to it (here’s a look at the template in English). This reminds me of the “Hipstper PDA Template” I used religiously about 10 years ago.
The Cite Card captures other people’s ideas that warrant attention. He says, “Important here is distinguishing ‘your idea (Discovery Card)’ and ‘someone else’s idea (Cite Card).’ Source of the information must be included in the Cite Card. A book, for example, author, year, page(s) are recorded for later use.”

In essence this is a Commonplace book broken up into card sized chunks.

Speculation:  You could probably make a digital version of this system much like Cyberzettel.com using Wordpress.

 

Re-imagining the Web Portal

Commercial portals:

  • Yahoo
  • Excite
  • MSN
  • AOL
  • Excite
  • NBCi
  • Lycos

 

Non corporate portals

Usually subject oriented.  Topical or local directory plus forum or social network, news.

Portals were all about banner ads.  They wanted to keep you on site viewing new pages to get the banner reps.  Is their really a point for portals today without advertising?

I’m striking out on WordPress Glossary Plugins

I wanted to add a glossary to my directory’s blog to handle some repetitive knowledge tasks.

Well I’ve looked through most of the WordPress plugins available and:

  1. The free version is under powered and the Pro version is a damn subscription costing $55 annually.  Dream on.  I got too many subscriptions already.  This ain’t a commercial blog.
  2. The whole glossary plugin is way to complicated for what I want.
  3. Sounds perfect but requires block editor.
  4. Sounds good, not recommended for my version of WP and/or has not been updated in 2 years.
  5. Should work, tried it, didn’t work. Plugin homepage 404 and plugin designers website in French.

 

I could also make do with a wiki plugin, or maybe a Knowledge Base plugin.   Both are a bit more than I need.

Search Engines that Have Found this Site

This will be a running list.

Site created 4 August 2022.  Launched around 8 August 2022.  Very few inbound links.

As of 18 August 2022.  Search was for “cyberzettel”

Bing – Yes.  extensive crawling.  Already got first SE hit via DuckDuckGo which relies on Bing.  Still surprised.

Google – Yes.  Several pages.

Yandex – No.

Mojeek – No.

Gigablast – No.

Brave – No.

Right Dao – No.

Yep – Yes.  This really surprised me. Only one or two pages plus a couple of pages that link to or mention.

Alexandria – No.

 

Bonus Surprise –

Wiby.me – little Wiby.me did not have this site in their index because they don’t crawl the web.  But they found two pages in their index that actually mentioned the site.  So they do keep their index fresh.  Cool.

This isn’t a critique of the search engines listed, but since I have a new site it presents an opportunity to test how fast these search engines find and index.

Music Discoveries I Like on Youtube

These are some of the best music videos I’ve found during the Pandemic on Youtube.  If I need to recommend something to someone I would start here.

Postmodern Jukebox: rewrites rock and pop songs to sound like 20th Century jazz songs.  They are wonderful.

 

Pentatonix is an a capella group.

 

###