I've tried several methods of keeping a log of my day-to-day activity when writing code. None of them really worked all that well. Here's what I'd like to have:
- automatic timestamps
- tagging (like we do on stackoverflow). Mainly for project names and technologies used
- Easy to build a weekly report from the results for status meetings
- Easy to search to find solutions to recurring issues (eg a certain error message)
- Accessible. Probably online as a website, but could be a shared file.
- Formatting. I'd like to have the ability to easily build tables and separate out <pre> content such as code snippets and error reports.
- Security. It would be nice if I could share some content of the site with others, but not all. Low priority if I get the other stuff.
I've tried the following solutions with some issues:
- MediaWiki: many very cool features. timestamps hard to deal with. Bizarre datastructure. Bad searching (can't search on words of three letters or less)
- Defect tools: I tried mantisbt.org. Good security. Bad for formatting and I didn't like their idea of "projects" when trying to use the system.
- Paper Notebook: very flexible, but hard to do the searching. Not online.
I was considering using emacs to open a remote file to keep it really simple. Has anyone tried it that way? Is there another defect tool that could do what I am thinking? Is there another option that I haven't considered?