How to keep an Engineering Log
emacs, portal
Solution
Check out org-mode. There are a bunch of tutorials here that really help show the power/ease. Specifically, I found this video useful.
The major benefits (IMO) of org-mode are:
- simplicity, it's just a text file (or set of files)
- flexibility, you can start very simple and grow your usage as you learn more
- expandability, very popular and new capabilities coming all the time
- versatility, you can get different views of your tasks - ordered by time, priority, other...
- readability, you can publish to HTML and other forms easily
Really, it's worth watching one of the videos to get an idea of what is available.
ORG's author, Carsten Dominik, sums it up nicely with this 24 word quote:
Org-mode does outlining, note-taking, hyperlinks, spreadsheets, TODO lists, project planning, GTD, HTML and LaTeX authoring, all with plain text files in Emacs
Problem
I've tried several methods of keeping a log of my day-to-day activity when writing code. None of them really worked all that well. Here's what I'd like to have: - automatic timestamps - tagging (like we do on stackoverflow). Mainly for project names and technologies used - Easy to build a weekly report from the results for status meetings - Easy to search to find solutions to recurring issues (eg a certain error message) - Accessible. Probably online as a website, but could be a shared file. - Formatting. I'd like to have the ability to easily build tables and separate out <pre> content such as code snippets and error reports. - Security. It would be nice if I could share some content of the site with others, but not all. Low priority if I get the other stuff. I've tried the following solutions with some issues: - MediaWiki: many very cool features. timestamps hard to deal with. Bizarre datastructure. Bad searching (can't search on words of three letters or less) - Defect tools: I tried mantisbt.org. Good security. Bad for formatting and I didn't like their idea of "projects" when trying to use the system. - Paper Notebook: very flexible, but hard to do the searching. Not online. I was considering using emacs to open a remote file to keep it really simple. Has anyone tried it that way? Is there another defect tool that could do what I am thinking? Is there another option that I haven't considered?