There are many different ways to track your ideas and to-do lists but do you remember them forever? There may have been many times, when you may have solved something difficult but never documented it, because you thought it would never happen again.

Now when it does happen again, what do you do? Follow the same steps over and over again, and to be frank how many times do you remember what you exactly did to solve the problem?

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In such cases you could have saved yourself some trouble by having documented those steps, ensuring that you don’t have to start from scratch always. Such documentation is also popularly known as Knowledge Base (KB) and you may have seen several softwares companies having it, the most popular one being Microsoft KB.

A knowledge base (or knowledgebase; abbreviated KB, kb or Δ) is a special kind of database for knowledge management. It provides the means for the computerized collection, organization, and retrieval of knowledge. – wikipedia

You can always build your own knowledge base, where you can write up information about how you solved a particular problem, which URLs you used and so on, doing this will help you build up a strong database using which you can easily retrieve data at a later date and solve repetitive problems much faster.

There are several simple and open source softwares such as The Knowledgebase, FaqForge, FAQEngine and more to create your personal knowledge database, you can install and run it on your current website or choose to run it on your local machine. If you are looking to run it on a local machine you can easily install WAMP Server which will install Apache, MySQL and PHP and configure it for you. You could also install a wiki and use it as a personal knowledge database. Gina Trapani from Lifehacker has a excellent article shows you how to install a wiki on your home PC.

If you are wondering what I use? I use a personal knowledgebase software which I created after modifying a OSS about 2 years ago, if anyone wants to try that out let me know, I just need to build in a install script to make it easier for you to install and it.