So I’m on the lookout for something, but I don’t know how to briefly describe it. I want something to help me document various projects at work. It’s not uncommon for me to spend a week setting something up, and it works for 2 years and then has a problem – and I have to re-learn everything about it from the ground up before I can start solving it. For example, I’m setting up a new VMWare server today, and I just know I’m going to forget some of the details on it – so I want to be able to type out some of the specs and processes, maybe use some tags, a coupel hyperlinks to more info, and be able to search for it a year from now. Does that make sense? Anybody have any suggestions?

  • Look into Personal Knowledge Management solutions. I don’t use any of the popular options there and instead run a wiki (specifically DokuWiki) for myself. I’ve seen people even run private forums to put this sort of info in so they can start a thread per “project”, update the OP for current state and take running notes in comments. It really depends on whichever system makes it easiest for you to write, and easy enough to find what you are looking for.

      • If you end up doing a wiki do consider DokuWiki vs something more complex to manager like MediaWiki. I like Doku because it’s simple and doesn’t even need a database because it stores the pages as files on disk (so worst case you can at least read the markup in a text editor if your wiki itself breaks). With just a few plugins you can add support for markdown, templates, tags, and more.