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That sounds brilliant, and yet I can't remember having heard or read this idea before! It kind of amazes me that you've been doing this for two decades already
by eitland 7y ago
That sounds brilliant, and yet I can't remember having heard or read this idea before!
It kind of amazes me that you've been doing this for two decades already.
- fit2rule 7y agoI always wonder why nobody else does it, but its a very pleasing experience to have an archive like this - and it has proven very valuable in production crunches and peaceful moments of downtime, alike. Another thing it allows me to do is generalise my reading in real time - I know I can always come back to the subject of the PDF in a few days time, or whenever really, without needing to know where to find the details: I just grep my file tree, and mine the data that way. Key thing is, though, that when saving the PDF, I always check that it is named a decent subject, derived from the <title> tags .. if there isn't one, I add it myself. This is the only place I pay attention to 'tagging an article' - in naming the file of a poorly-named page, but if the page title fits the subject, I don't change a thing. And it means I have a huge set of data also in the filenames, not just the contents themselves .. Periodically, I use 'detox' on my PDFArchive/ directory, also .. this helps with consistent-naming for regexes, and so on. I keep getting the itch to put all this into a DB with proper indexing or whatever, but .. actually using plain ol' shell tools is turning out to be just as productive. Its a big set of data, but plain ol' files and pipes is proving to be all I really need to get the data mined ..