knowfox/knowfox

Personal Knowledge Management. Use branch "minimal change" to deploy as laravel package.

Knowfox

Knowfox is my Personal Knowledge Management system. Having been an keen Evernote user since 2012, I finally got around to taking my precious notes to my own server.

I want

• Hierarchies. Inspired by Dave Winer's Worldoutline and Fargo, I want my knowledge base to have a deep structure, not be only two stories tall.
• Tags. Where a single hierarchy is not enough, tags can link common topics in the least intrusive way. Since the times of Web 2.0, tags are everywhere.
• Typed relationships. Sometimes though, hierarchies are too strict and tags are too loose. For example, I want to link authors to books, founders to companies, cause to effect. For this, typed, bi-directional relationships are king.
• Markdown. There are other many similar and nice text formats, but Markdown is simple and popular and has won the race.
• Bookmarking. I frequently take note of websites and like to mark them for later reading.
• Pictures. My notes have lots of pictures. Mostly screenshots, but some photos or diagrams added as well.
• Privacy. All my notes and pictures are mine and should be visible to no one.
• Simple journalling. I used Evernote on a daily basis and will do so with Knowfox, too. Easy, date-based journalling is a feature I use every day.
• Sharing. Sometimes I want to share a note and its pictures. This should be painless and explicit.
• Publishing. Knowledge wants to be communicated sometimes. For this, I want to export a sub-tree of my hierarchy as beautiful slide deck, effortlessly.

This gives me the basic structure. On top of this,

• all my Evernote notes should go in there,
• my catalogue of eBooks as well,
• my timelines, too.

The resulting system should be easy to understand, maintain and deploy. CouchDB would have been an nice option with Hoodie on to of it. Ultimately though, I felt more confident with Laravel 5 and MySQL so this is what Knowfox is built on.

Status

Knowfox is usable and very nicely so.

• Full text search works, maybe even better than the one in Evernote.
• The integrated Markdown editor has no inline preview of images, but otherwise is a joy to use.
• Picture handling is very slick, thanks to the integrated Dropzone.js and automatic inclusion of image links into the note's Markdown.
• A bookmarklet helps me to bookmark websites and gather their content for later reference.
• I have imported my most important Evernote notebooks and now rely on it for my everyday work and projects.
• There is a hosted version at https://knowfox.com which is free to use. However, I make no guarantees as to the stability of this service. Ultimately, Knowfox is meant for self hosting.

There is a brief presentation about the system, too.

The Future

I have built Knowfox in a frency to have a usable system as soon as possible. For others to be able to contribute, it most urgently needs automated tests. Some more importers for my other databases for eBooks and timelines will follow. Maybe native apps or a FUSE filesystem at some point.

knowfox's Issues

SQL error when creating new concept

Following the guide in the wiki I created a first concept ("Journal") and was greeted with the following error.

SQLSTATE[42S22]: Column not found: 1054 Unknown column 'attachments.event_id' in 'where clause' (SQL: select * from `attachments` where `attachments`.`event_id` = 1 and `attachments`.`event_id` is not null order by `is_default` desc)
(View: knowfox/resources/views/concept/show.blade.php) 
(View: knowfox/resources/views/concept/show.blade.php)

Same error appears when editing existing concepts.

[Feature Request] Add Tag Cloud or Tag Page

Currently it is difficult to discover them

some explanation of relationships

I'm still not getting all abaout relationships. I manage to set a "similar" relationship through configuration, but can then apply this relationships between differents concepts? I see the Relations tab while editing a concept and the example 42: { type: uses }. What is this 42? Should set the relation by looking the id of the related concepts? Thanks

Registering results in error

When registering I get this:
Whoops, looks like something went wrong.
1/1
FatalErrorException in HandleExceptions.php line 59:
Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded

Is there some documentation as to how the installation has to be done exactly? Something seems to be wrong.

auth setup

This looks like a fantastic project, very much in line with the kind of thing I have been looking for.

I have been trying for a day or so to set it up as a self-hosted service but I am hitting a wall no matter which setting I tweak. In the env file, mailtrap.io is prefilled and I had seen you recommend it here. In the config file, however, I see that mailgun is prefilled

I tried to setup gmail but have not succeeded.

I am wondering if there is anyway to disable user authentication. I am happy to keep tweaking settings until I figure out authentication but - more importantly - I would like to really see the service in use on my server and see if it fits my workflow.

Thank you for your attention and all your work

mercury plugin is not working

the bookmarklet is not working anymore, as mercury is not offering the saas either. Is there a way to reuse this functionality? Thanks

double definition of softdeletes on concepts

On a new install migrations fail

[Illuminate\Database\QueryException]                                                                                                           
  SQLSTATE[42S21]: Column already exists: 1060 Duplicate column name 'deleted_at' (SQL: alter table `concepts` add `deleted_at` timestamp null)

This is because softdeletes are defined on creation already.

entangle:timeline gives empty page on show

Message is SQLSTATE[42S22]: Column not found: 1054 Unknown column 'attachments.timeline_id' in 'where clause'

Search is not scoped to the user

Tried this out briefly on the website....

Clicking on one yields a page with:

Whoops, looks like something went wrong.

Exceptions not thrown but called like a message

On multiple ocasions there's an error when you try to throw exceptions.

throw \Exception("message");

should be

throw new \Exception("message");

https://github.com/oschettler/knowfox/search?utf8=✓&q=throw+\Exception&type=

Is there any way to set up locally on windows or linux?

I could not find any tutorial that describes how to do this. Is it possible?

[Feature Request] Docker image for installing knowfox easily

Hi,

Would it be possible to have a knowfox docker image available? This would allow people to try out knowfox without needing to install PHP and nodejs directly on their machines.

It would certainly help me, as I haven't worked with php or nodejs so I don't know what I'm doing!

Cheers,

Dave

[Feature Request] Show Concept ID on the Note for easier linking rather than on address bar

[Feature Request] Show Concept ID on the Note for easier linking rather than on address bar

concord/concordUtils.js 403 - forbidden error

I installed knowfox on Uberspace. When I switch to outline view, I only see a white square. The console output says concord/concordUtils.js, and status is 403 - Forbidden.

It also says the following: You are running Vue in development mode[...]

[Help] How do you use tasks?

Bookmarklet default URL

The bookmarklet has the default URL https://knowfox.com, which is obviously different in my case.

After changing it to my URL (without https) it shows the save dialog for a short time, but then gives a "Whoops, looks like something went wrong." notice.

what's is the use of the concept types?

I do understand the concept of concept type, but cannot understand what's its use. There is no way to list concepts by type, nor search them. I see that the folder type list its children, also the book list has a table of children. How about the website type? is it created with the bookmarklet? Does it have any other internal functionality? Thanks

Bookmarklet should not use hardcoded URL

When the goal is, that people use their own knowfox instances, the URL in the bookmark should not be hardcoded but read from config.

journal entry

Great project.
I am looking for a personal knowledge management software (of course, open source - so that I can fiddle around when i have time) - which will let me manage information .
I wandered around through a couple of project before I stumbled upon this one

• DeepMehta (Connected Desktop) - great concept
• CherryTree ( great - but features like relationships, web snippet etc are missing)
• Joplin ( great )
  I am leaving out commercial products which are awesome too - Evernote, Mindmapper
  I like Knowfox - because it solves most of my needs.

I am having an issue to make a journal entry. When I click on the date on the top-menu I get this message -> "No "Journal" root". What does this mean? Should i fix it? OR leave it alone
See image

Bugsnag usage is problematic

On a fresh install a user usually doesn't have a bugsnag account. Yet the ApplicationServiceProvider binds the default logging interface to bugsnag, even if it's not available. At the very least local logging shouldn't be disabled by using bugsnag.multi:

$this->app->alias('bugsnag.multi', \Illuminate\Contracts\Logging\Log::class);
$this->app->alias('bugsnag.multi', \Psr\Log\LoggerInterface::class);

With Laravel 5.6 this can of course be handled better.

[Error] Whoops, looks like something went wrong.

This error occurs under the following use cases:

1. Edit Concept
2. Change the any of the fields under the bottom tabs
3. Press [Save Changes]

Result:

Whoops, looks like something went wrong.

[Help] Please provide an example on how to create typed relationships

I cannot get that to work

Scope tags by user

uncought exception when sending emails

Swift_TransportException (530)
Expected response code 250 but got code "530", with message "530 5.7.1 Authentication required "

Not using the correct credentials for sending registration emails will result in an exception that is not handled.

Edit: Better catch the exception and display a useful message.

concord and ebubjs should not be symlinked

It would be better to add them to the webpack build proccess and have that either copy the libraries or build them and put them in js/vendor or something like that.

Show some demo on the landing!

Hi! I've just stumbled upon your project and might give it a try in the next days! I particularly liked that you put some effort in the theory behind tags, hierarchies, etc. I've been able to see some bits of the project on the slides but I think that You could do something super simple like record 2min of you messing around your app and put it on youtube and embed the video on the landing. It'd take you maybe 1h of work if you want to structure the video and show many features and it'd make it much easier to get an idea for anyone like me stumbling upon the project!

I stumbled upon it while trying to find some interesting books on modern knowledge management systems, tagging, hierarchies, etc so if you know of any, or where to look, make sure to let me know! thank you! vielen dank!