* Sriram Karra<karra....@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 1:33 AM, Karl Voit<devn...@karl-voit.at> wrote:
I am using Org-mode to organize my contacts following
org-contacts.el[1] and a *lot* of additional properties. Those
things are so far =BBby convention=AB and I always wanted to sum it up
on WORG but did not find time for that.
Even with BBDB there are only few "standard" fields, and a tonne of custom
fields. If conventions are only in naming the property fields that is
trivially fixed through a config file (something I do already for the BBDB
handlers).
Oh, I am certain that for mapping purposes there are technical
solutions.
Originally I wanted to sum up my method (my convention) to spare
other peoples time to come up with their own. I looked at other
software solutions and meta-data standards to get a convention that
reflects a «general» attempt.
To be fair: I could not find any common ISO or something other
standard for that purpose which overrules other conventions.
So a *common* convention could spare users to create those
(optional) mappings by themselves.
I am a beginner level org-mode user - I was away from Emacs for nearly 8
years and returned to find this fascinating and gigantic new development in
the Emacs world :)
This paragraph I could have written on my own one year ago :-)
But if you can document your contact structure, I could
potentially implement it some point in the future.
It's fairly simple: I do have an Org-mode file named «contact.org»
with a tree: no flat structure, since I tend to map family trees to
Org-mode headline hierarchies:
- groups
- relatives
- families sharing the last name A
- family of person A
- person A
- [other members of family of person A]
- friends
- [same concept as above with relatives]
- job B
- [more or less flat list of people I got in touch with while
working for company B]
For less tight connections that do not belong to the sub-hierarchies
above, I do have separate headlines which contain only a flat
sub-hierarchy each:
- people (people which are not friends, family, or other categories)
- passing acquaintances (people I hardy know but want to store info)
- companies (I am using tags to differ between entries of companies)
Each and every entry is created using a yasnippet[2] template like
this:
,----[ vkcontact ]
| # name : Org-contacts template for a person
| # --
| ** $1 $2 :$1$2:
| :PROPERTIES:
| :TYPE: ${3:$$(yas/choose-value '("person" "company"))}
| :TITLE:
| :EMAIL: $4
| :URL:
| :MOBILE: 0043/
| :HOMEPHONE:
| :WORKPHONE:
| :PHONE:
| :COMPANY:
| :STREET:
| :POSTALCODE:
| :CITY:
| :COUNTRY: Österreich
| :END:
|
| first contact: $0
`----
This ends up in entries like:
,----[ vkcontentry ]
| ** John Smith :JohnSmith:
| :PROPERTIES:
| :TYPE: person
| :TITLE: Dr.
| :EMAIL: john.sm...@example.com
| :URL: http://john.smith.com/
| :MOBILE: 0043/6123/12345678
| :HOMEPHONE:
| :WORKPHONE:
| :PHONE:
| :COMPANY: Graz University of Technology
| :STREET: Herrengasse 1
| :POSTALCODE: 8010
| :CITY: Graz
| :COUNTRY: Österreich
| :END:
|
| first contact: we met at CHI2012 conference
`----
One minor flaw is that I have to modify the level of the headline
resulting from the template according to the level where it belongs.
Maybe somebody has a solution to that little but annoying thing?
Below the «first contact»-line, I start to write all things related
to a contact starting with an active time-stamp: changes in phone
numbers or addresses, little things I do want to track (favourite
sport, links to other friends of mine, what I gave for birthday,
...).
At the bottom of every contact, I add (repeating) events for
birthday and other anniversaries. When I am doing something with
only one person (going out for lunch, doing a biking tour, ...) I am
creating entries for those events directly in this contacts.org
file. Also handy: keeping track of doctor visits and any health
related information right at the entry of this doctor.
My current tags for contacts are defined in the header of my
contacts.org:
,----[ first line of my contacts.org ]
| #+TAGS: job(j) friends(f) health(e) hotels(o) restaurants_bars(r) \
| sport(s) students_TU(t) relatives(r) company(c)
`----
... but this is pretty much related to my previous system
(jPilot/datebk6/PalmOS) which offered only one single category for
each contact. I might re-think these tags in future.
I am using the following yasnippet template to generate a link to an
entry of my contact list:
,----[ vkcontact ]
| # name : expand link to contact
| # --
| [[contact:$1][${2:$$(unless yas/modified-p
| (let ((field (nth 0 (yas/snippet-fields (first (yas/snippets-at-point))))))
| (concat (buffer-substring (yas/field-start field) (yas/field-end
field)))))}]] $0
`----
So when I am invoking «vkcontact» + TAB, and I enter «John Smith» +
TAB, it ends up in: «[[contact:John Smith][John Smith]]».
Of course there has to be an entry in my .emacs which enables the
custom link:
,----[ snippet from .emacs: the line with «contact» is the one relevant ]
| (setq org-link-abbrev-alist
| '(
| ("bib" . "~/archive/papers_from_web/%s.bib")
| ("ref" . "file:~/share/all/org-mode/references.org::/%s/")
| ("pdf" . "~/archive/papers_from_web/%s.pdf")
| ("notes" . "~/archive/papers_from_web/%s-notes.pdf")
| ("contact" . "~/share/all/org-mode/contacts.org::/\*.*%s/")
| ("vktsfile" . "~/share/all/org-mode/memacs/files.org_archive::/\*.*%s/")
| ))
`----
Do you use any import/export/sync code with org-contacts?
Not yet.
I did not have time to implement something on my own and so far the
desire to do so was almost non existent (time!). But if there will
be a solution which helps me syncing my phone contacts (again), I am
willing to give it a try.
Personally I do want to have control over this process: I store
*everything* about a contact in Org-mode but I just want to have
synced phone numbers, email addresses, and names to my Android
device. Nothing more, nothing less.
2. http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Yasnippet
