See Hobix—a Ruby-driven, text-file oriented blog system.
Or 43folders.com—a lot of the stuff on its wiki is just file-fiddling stuff. No binary formats.
Tip for geeks: If you install the GNU coreutils for Windows you can do things like:
pear list|grep XML
PEAR is a PHP programming library of ready-to-use code. pear is the command to use to remote-control your PEAR modules. list gives you a list of all your installed modules to “standard output”. With the pipe character (|) you can “redirect standard output” to be “standard input” to what comes after the pipe. In this case, the grep command. grep has “XML” as an argument here, and it will then print all lines that have a match on “XML”. This lets you filter stuff easily.
Back to my timetracking file.
Using grep and it should not be rocket-science, really.
- I could start using tagging (“updates”, “maintenance”, “bugfix”, “new_development”), and easily find the things I have done for clients “by type”.
- Files are easy to back up.
That was a lousy list. Can you come up with more funky things to do with a textfile-based time-tracking system? (Date, hours worked, description of job; that’s what I’m talking about here.)
Well, I hope this makes me organize better. And be more sure of myself for it.