I didn’t love the job, and a late-Sunday-night conversation with my partner Lucy turned in to me resigning the next morning. Hardly spur of the moment — this has been coming for some time — but not what either of us had ‘planned’.
The turn of events saw me free by Tuesday afternoon. Laptops and badges handed in. Quite surreal.
And so here I am: Johnny.Decimal. My job. (I need to think of something to write in the ‘occupation’ box; suggestions welcome.)
≡
There’s this whole corner of the internet dedicated to personal knowledge management (‘PKM’). It’s massive.
People spend hours of their spare time on this. They hang out in forums. They mail me and ask for guidance. They agonise over this stuff at home…
…and then they go to work and it’s like it never happened.
‘Knowledge management’ doesn’t go far enough
It’s not like we haven’t thought about this. There’s a whole job function dedicated to knowledge management.
But whenever I’ve seen anyone in this role their focus tends to be on the organisation’s databases. That SFIA description talks about your ‘knowledge management database’ but the word ‘file’ doesn’t appear once.
Is it that the file system is just so unglamorous? It is, right, I know it is. (It’s one of my fears in trying to make this my job: organising your files is, well … boring.)
But that’s no excuse to neglect it. Your internal knowledge databases may be amazing but that’s only part of the picture.
Why is this okay?
The cost of being disorganised at home is negligible: you might be frustrated that you can’t find your insurance documentation, but it’s not costing literally hundreds of dollars an hour.
This is the problem that I intend to solve.
≡
I thought I’d use this first post to explain the numbering scheme.
As you might expect, each post has an ID. This post’s ID is 22.00.0001.
Blog posts are breaking the rules. I wanted to give them some sort of identifier but in the context of the broader site they don’t fit in the overall structure.
Imagine if every post had a Johnny.Decimal ID: 22.01, 22.02, and so on. My navigation tree would soon get out of control. And I’d run out of numbers quite quickly.
This is a nice example of why I save the 00 numbers. In this case I’m using 22.00, which is the ‘meta’ ID for the blog category, as an ID to represent all blog posts.
Each post then gets its own supplementary ID, starting from 0001. (I’m assuming I’ll never write more than 10,000 posts.)
Accessing the posts
The main site has a couple of IDs dedicated to viewing lists of posts.
There’s 22.01 which shows the full content of the latest posts, and 22.02 which is an index of all posts but only their titles.
If I add ‘tags’ to future posts, I might use 22.03 and upwards to show pages that list blog posts with a specific tag.
I’m just having a bit of fun with this
None of this was really necessary. :-)
≡