card collection

[cjsmith]

Trello recently converted to a much more restrictive plan for unpaid users. I'd seen all the warnings go by in e-mail: "We will put your boards* into a 'Workspace'! Really, we will! Any day now!" What they didn't mention was that the 'workspace' would make several of my collections inaccessible, and that some of the actions critical to managing them would be impossible from the phone. Oh, and the username and password I thought I had don't work any more because they're now Atlassian and Atlassian doesn't accept bare user names, only email...

Well, that ends my fifteen or so years of using Trello. So it goes.

Last night I got my data pulled off. It is exported in a truly impenetrable** JSON format, but preliminary scouting shows that there are services out there that'll read it, and worst case it's probably one line*** in Python.


_________________________________
* A "board" is essentially a collection of note cards, each with a title, an optional description, possibly some comments, and possibly some attachments such as links or photos.

** folks, there's no excuse for not including whitespace.

*** not counting a page or two of "import" statements ;-}

Comments

[labelleizzy]

I used Trello for a couple of minutes just before pandemic shelter in place slammed down and I remember thinking, "this might work as a way to organize my thoughts/phrases/story arcs/chunks" ... Should I bother getting back to it? Sounds like not.

[cjsmith]

It was convenient while I had it. Working on a house remodel about five years ago, it was invaluable, as it allowed sharing the "boards" with others. (I was in Antioch on night shift and Rob was in either Walnut Creek or Sunnyvale and most emphatically day mode.) Mainly, I was reminded that data held by others can vanish at any time. If you have a backup strategy you trust, go for it! (...and tell me what it is, please? I kind of liked my cocktails collection on Trello.)

[zahraa]

Augh!

[cjsmith]

Yeah, frustrating! But nothing was permanently lost, which is a win. Now I need another solution for organizing notes on various topics from both phone and desktop - ideally one with a good backup to some data storage I own.

[zahraa]

Well, I've been forced to use Google Keep. I don't think it lets you add pictures. I haven't found a better solution. Sometimes I miss my Palm Pilot.

[cjsmith]

I hadn’t even HEARD of Google keep until this past year. Still not quite sure what exactly it is or what its capabilities are. I guess if I’m not going to own the storage for my data, Google is less likely to randomly throw it away than many? I mean, given that data mining is their bread and butter?

[zahraa]

It is reasonably powerful, but I haven't found a way to search within a note. You can color code things, like, I color coded all of my period notes in red, and then sort by the colors. It is definitely a compromise vs. keeping your own stuff on your own drives, but it's the best one I've been able to find.

[cjsmith]

Oh ouch - searching within notes would be pretty key for me. Dang. This kind of application shouldn't be a big ask, and yet.

[zahraa]

You can search your notes, and it tells you which note has a phrase in it, but not where in the note that phrase is. Some of my notes are very long.

[cjsmith]

Ah! Okay, that might work, then. The application I'm searching for most has very short notes. Still kind of wish for photos, but links might do.

Can you collect some of your notes into a group (say, "recipes" or "things colored green" or whatever) and then search only within that group?

[zahraa]

You can color-code them and search for a whole group by color.

[cjsmith]

OK, can I search within a color only? Eh, I should just go play with it I suppose.

[hitchhiker]

glad you were able to get all the data pulled out!

[cjsmith]

Thanks! It was easy, if tedious and ugly. Photos are essentially unlinked and the associations of those with any Trello cards will need to be reconstructed. But things could be a lot worse. :)

[metahacker]

Yuck.

For the json formatting, throw it into an IDE like VS Code, and ask Prettier to format it for you? It's kinda magic.

[cjsmith]

Yeah, that'd be a good step! Thanks!

[amaebi]

May all your lore soon be fully accessible to you again.

[cjsmith]

Thank you! I’m certainly in the market for a note cards style of application that I can depend on.