Captain's blog: 2007/02

A Personal Bank for your Ideas

Posted Sunday, February 25, 2007 at 2/25/2007 12:47:00 AM

Sometimes a great idea comes to you out of the blue, but before you can think any further about the idea, you have to dash off and attend to a dozen other things. Afterwards, what remains is only a lingering feeling, a vague awareness that you had a great idea earlier, but you can no longer remember what it was. For thousands of years, creative practical people have probably solved this annoyance by tying knots or scribbling ideas on something, so they could go about their daily business first and revisit those ideas at a more convenient time later.

Continuing with the approach of scribbling ideas down, I made a little web-based tool which basically allows you to fill out a form, roughly categorize the entry, automatically have it date-time stamped and saved for later review. Like a piggy bank that grows with every contribution, you can build a large personal bank of ideas. Then, whenever you want to draw upon the collected knowledge in your personal bank of ideas, simply use the search feature to display and sort ideas.

So if this sounds useful to you, and you don’t mind that it’s still a work in progress, I’ve made this tool available as an Open Source project at SourceForge. Visit the ideasBank project to download and install on your own PHP, MySQL-enabled server.

Additional projects will be released in the future on SourceForge as well.