20080616

Good collection management software

Regular readers of this column know that I have a large collection of PC Cards. Some would say 'too large' and I'm not sure they'd be wrong. I was out in the garage last night looking for a specific card. I couldn't find it. I know it is there, somewhere, but don't know exactly where. Maybe I'll find it tonight when I look in a place that I remembered driving into Boulder today.

This got me to thinking: how can I manage all these cards. I need to figure out some way of recording generic information about the card. Where it lives, what dongles it needs, what driver it uses, etc. It would also be nice to know when I last tested it, how well it worked, etc. Maybe some notes about the card, like "This card has a blue label on it, and needs to have the dongle wiggled just so: .... for it to work." Oh, and it would also be nice to generate reports so that I can maintain a list of cards that I've tested and when on a web page automatically. I did this years ago, but stopped when it became too big a pita to keep current.

In the past, I've not seen anything that's good at doing all these things. I thought I'd ask my readers if they knew of anything that solves this problem? I know that there's many tools that could be used to build a solution, but many of them require a fair amount of customization to make into a workable solution. A quick google search doesn't turn up anything that's more sophisticated than a generic database. Does anybody know of something that's fairly close?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello Warner,

you might want to have a look at tellico.
It can be used for what you need, although you will probably have to do some modifications to meet your needs. It's KDE based and lives in misc/tellico in the ports tree. Its database is xml based and it uses xsl for export.

So, probably, you will be faster with a generic database, as you mentioned :-)

I hope that helps.

michael

Anonymous said...

You can also try iTaggit.com. It's a free collection management site that has hundreds of categories (PCs are one of them) and you can make your own category online and add fields.

Unknown said...

Hey Warner,

it sounds like something that a simple wiki is ideally set up to handle. Just install moinmoin or something. I like moinmoin because of the simplicity of adding new pages.

It also looks like you'll be familiar with it from wiki.freebsd.org

Anonymous said...

hi warner, have you found a nice solution
for this need?

regards,

-andré