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How I use Hackpad

Hackpad


I wanted to talk a bit about Hackpad, a personal wiki I use for all kinds of stuff. I guess I use it in a way that a lot of people use Evernote. I don’t use Evernote because it does not appeal to me, and I already pay Dropbox for cloud storage. Dropbox offers me enough space so that I shouldn’t have to pay for another provider. Hackpad syncs to Dropbox. Having said that, here are some of my favorite Hackpad features:


  1. Hackpad lets you sync with Dropbox, which is great.
  2. It’s painless to use, the web-ui is great.
  3. Works offline (read-only mode with Dropbox sync).
  4. It’s easy to share your content.
  5. It has an API.
  6. Moderation tools.
  7. No ads.
  8. Free.

The last two might be worrisome, but Hackpad is working on a pay-for plan that is hopefully economical enough to support my use case as an individual merely keeping around a personal semi-private wiki. In which case I would gladly pay for Hackpad. I love it. I love having a personal wiki.

These are the kinds of things I do with it:

Lists!

  • I am in the process of creating a list of all books I have ever read. (It is not a very impressive list). I have found that I want to write a little bit about every book I read from now on to help me remember thoughts I had while reading the story, remember the characters and the ideas and philosophies. Right now it is just a list, but because Hackpad is a wiki I actually will start to make some of those list items links to my personal thoughts about some of these books. Perhaps I’ll start writing about the book while I am still reading it, which would be super cool.
  • I’m creating a list of things I’ve learned while working at Leftronic. I am currently working at a startup that is still in a high risk situation. If it doesn’t end well I still want to ensure that I get something out of the experience. This list is helping me track what I have learned while working there.
  • I am also creating a list of work accomplished while working at Leftronic. When I worked at Rackspace I sometimes could not remember as months passed what I had accomplished during that time. At Leftronic, again still in very risky early stage startup mode, keeping track of what I have done and my productivity is very important to me.
  • I also have a list of programming ideas that I maintain. My good friend Geoff once pointed out to me when I complained of having no ideas on which to work on that I should write down my ideas when I have them. Now I have more ideas than I know what to do with and no time. Some (most) of the ideas are pretty terrible, but some I want to pursue. And I have learned that I have to write the idea down as soon as possible because it doesn’t take long for it to escape me, even if I try to remember it later I have a hard time doing so.
  • I have a tiny (but growing!) list of music I want to buy or at least explore more.
  • I just started a list of books or authors I want to read.
  • I want to start recording ideas for stories I have.

Hackpad is also great for task management!

When I was working on my gitify.me idea I created this ever growing task list before I finally switched to using GitHub issues.

When I still worked at Rackspace I used it to generate PPP (progress, plans, problems) reports for my manager and coworkers.

A personal wiki rocks.

One thing I love about Hackpad is just how fluid and easy it is to use. Nothing gets in the way of just writing. And that is great. There is no edit mode, you just place your cursor and start typing. (Hey I love my vim modes, but web based UIs hardly ever make this easy).

It encourages me to write more. Which is great. I want to get better, self-improve and store some of those things in my brain to reflect on later. I just thought of a thing in fact, maybe I will start writing down vim tips I’m working on or want to learn.

In any case I have a million ideas of just how to use Hackpad, lists and tasks being just the two that come to naturally. A personal wiki is an amazing resource that maybe one day will leave a nice record of my time here on Earth. Hackpad’s long-term stability and existence of course are a concern, but the dev team is very cool and friendly (and I wish I had more time to work on that browser extension I made for Hackpad) and I think they want to build a real business.

Of course if Hackpad gets acquired or shuts down I will be sad, but at least I have the Dropbox sync so my content sticks around and the knowledge of how wonderful it is to have a personal wiki.

| Thu Dec 20, 2012 by @apphacker

A brave new world

Twitter is not just about what's for breakfast anymore: also the live tweeting of warfare.

[via allthingsd]

I just wanted to see what it would be like to embed a tweet. It requires embedding JavaScript to work. I guess I trust Twitter. Seems to work pretty well. If I were Twitter I would have maybe just used an iframe, but that could lead to security issues via click jacking.

Here's a much more positive tweet:

Yay!

| Wed Nov 14, 2012 by @apphacker

Google's reverse strategy

A weird thing to consider I think:

  • To develop a native iOS application requires Apple's Mac OS X operating system.
  • To develop a native Windows Phone application requires Microsoft's Windows operating system.
  • To develop a native Android application you cannot use Google's ChromeOS operating system.

You could edit files using something like Cloud9, but you cannot test, debug or deploy your application. There is more to developing than just editing files.

| Mon Nov 12, 2012 by @apphacker

made a blog with jekyll

Made a blog with Jekyll. Setting it up made me want to kill myself. I like it though because it's static, and will let me just do stuff with HTML. I put it on github. I'm also using Fabric to deploy it and gruntjs to build the frontend of it.

| Sun Nov 11, 2012 by @apphacker