Using OneNote for Different Note Taking Tasks

For a long time, I have been keeping notes on ideas for projects, work I have done, and other thoughts using Microsoft OneNote. It has so many things in different notebooks that I forget about them sometimes until I go back and want to add or use the ideas.

Take my news project. It was something I have wanted to build for a few years. But I just never got to it or was motivated to make it. But at some point, I made a notebook with a few notes about the idea, wrote out some of the database tables, and kind of got some things organized.

I have tried a few other notes apps and programs, but OneNote seems to work out for what I want. I do not even remember why I got into using it for things. It is also not like I am starting using it and took massive amounts of notes until many years have gone by. It may have been when I got a tablet with a stylus that I could write things down that I really gave it a try, but never used it all that much.

When I was in college, I took some notes in Google Docs for some Computer Science classes as I had my laptop out. In some math classes, I was able to use OneNote with a tablet and stylus as I needed to put math symbols down fast. Another class I used OneNote for was a science class, and I found it faster to type than to write. I could also add images of what the person was teaching easy enough to the notes.

For work, I used it to keep track of the different things I did on projects. I would usually embed a spreadsheet with computer hardware notes. I also added photos of the project along with other details. When I switched jobs to doing IT work, we used MACs for everything and an iPad. OneNote on an iPad is great. But I did not use it for work on the iPad.

Anyway, to kind of wrap things up, I have found OneNote to be a handy tool for notes and keeping track of information for me. There are other options out there like Evernote, Keep, Google Docs, or even just text files. But the ability to drop text any place I want on a page then write on it using a tablet, all synced over OneDrive. That is probably what makes me keep using it.

I hope this helps some people get an idea of what to use OneNote for. It could also just help you understand how notes on projects can come and help you out later when you are not expecting it. Let me know what you use in the comments.

Create Custom Sites or Live with Tools That Do The Job Kind of Like You Want?

Right now, I have a few sites that I want to build out. These sites could be made with custom code and all kinds of custom backends to make them work how I want them to. But that would take a lot of work, and in some cases, using something like WordPress may be enough to get it working. But that is about as far as it would go, just enough, not really what I want.

Some prebuilt tools have the advantage of having other people help build them, and this makes them do all kinds of things without me having to come up with a way to make it work. But they don’t do exactly what I want, and in most cases, add a lot of extra junk / HTML I don’t need. Just this page has so much additional trash code thrown in to support things nothing to do with blogs, but it makes it so you can make a store or page with a WordPress site.

I think I will have to suck it up and put in the work to make what I want. There will not be a plugin or way I can make a site builder do what I want. Two of my projects are like this, and I need to chose what one I think can become something that starts to make me some money first. I may have to get some parttime development work soon anyway, but both of these would be good to push out into something more.

One thing I will need to figure out for both is how I want to produce the content. One requires a lot of me creating the content, and the other requires me to do a lot of me researching and monitoring the content. I am not even sure if other people want my stuff, either. But this is some of my ideas, and I don’t have a good set of software I could sell yet, so that is also off the table. I also expect both sites would need ads and donation’s to pay for them, but I’m not too fond of ads and feel strange getting money from people.

Then I have some video projects, and I want to make a site to store them separately from YouTube. There seem to be some ways I could have my videos on a WordPress site, but then I would again be dependent on others rather than my own site. Let’s get some videos out before I put too much thought into it.

To finish it up, I will need to create a site for one of the projects to make it work how I want it to. The other can start as a page builder, but I should use it to create a system for it that I control soon. It may even be a good piece of content for that site going over building a custom website.