Coldreader

Coldreader is a casual, personal databasing system.

It may be helpful to think of it as something half-way between an mindmap and a private wiki. I used it in place of Evernote, as a personal information management tool. Out of the box, it may seem a little trivial, but once you start building it out with your own custom Aspects, you’ll find that there’s really no other tool like it.

It makes no assumptions about what kind of information you want to keep track. In Coldreader, there are essentially two kinds of things: Subjects, and Aspects.

A Subject can contain an arbitrary number of Aspects. Aspects are like a single piece of content. That may be text, an image, an API result, and so forth. By itself, a basic Aspect just stores its information as text in the database. But you can extend simple aspects with a little bit of code so that they can behave however you like. By modifying the boilerplate with your own logic, you can retrieve API results, perform a calculation, whatever you like. For more information, see Developing Custom Aspects below.

Coldreader is primarily aimed at people who are comfortable with basic web development using PHP and Javascript. It’s built using Laravel 5.6, Bootstrap 3, and Vue.js.

This is the open-source version. It is configured to support a single user, and includes some tools to make it easy to customize the system for your own uses.

Use cases:

• Project management system
• Personal CRM system
• Build custom dashboards to track subjects of interest
• Manage your collection of media
• Track your notes and references as you research new things
• Create a knowledge base of problems you have previously solved
• Keep a library of your favorite recipes
• API test bed - quickly add new features by implementing an API and using your existing data
• Organize your data however you like