The entry below is classified as a LEGACY post, meaning that it was written (well) before the current version of Avalonstar was released. Although these posts have survived the numerous moves over years, there is no guarantee that they've survived the trip unscathed (especially the links).

LEGACY–

January 12, 2007

File (Re-)Organization

It happens all the time - new year, another reason to change things around.

Now, where did I put that?

A lot of reorganization and cleaning has been happening to my files. It makes me wonder why I don't do that on a more monthly (or even weekly or daily) basis. It's always nice to be able to turn on the monitor in the morning and find exactly what you need in the exact place you left it (without having to use search). Given my memory and my "Aries" nature, I tend to just click on random things until my brain can catch up to what my cursor is doing. I've gotten so entropic over the past few months, that I've been dropping items like PSD's in the first directory I can find (command + D is a bad thing).

Getting out of the mess.

I've tried on multiple occasions to buckle down on my sloppy nature and start organizing files the way they should be - even to go so far as throwing Subversion into the mix once again. However, when I finally get to the "decide a directory structure" phase, I get completely lost. Must be the ADD again.

There are so many ways I can organize files and the fact that the number of different projects I'm working on is increasing doesn't help much. So let me show you how I used to organize my files:

Work By Year
 |--- 2004
 |     |--- 2004 - Illustrator
 |     |--- 2004 - InDesign
 |     |--- 2004 - Photoshop
 |     |--- 2004 - Web Design
 |--- 2005
 |     |--- 2005 - Illustrator
 |     |--- 2005 - InDesign
 |     |--- 2005 - Photoshop
 |     |--- 2005 - Web Design
 |--- 2006
 |     |--- Photoshop
 |     |--- A stupid mess. (no, not really a directory.)
 |--- 2007 (All on the desktop.)

Sad isn't it. I also used to name my files in a certain way (I still do to a point), project_component_variant.extension But with say, all the Avalonstar PSD's I'm throwing in these days, I'm starting to get lazy with this too.

I was talking to Jen before we went to bed last night, and she said the best way to organize my files would be by project, so more like this:

Design
 |--- 2007
 |     |--- Avalonstar
 |     |     |--- Photoshop
 |     |     |--- HTML
 |     |--- Nyxsis
 |     |--- [...]

I'm only guessing really. But whenever I thought of doing this, would I just mix up the different file types or would I then again create another directory under each project for say, mockups and coded pages? (As shown above.)