Although personal information managers (PIMs) come in all shapes and colors, choosing the one that fits your needs is not as easy as it might seem. Despite trying dozens of otherwise excellent PIM applications, I still haven't found a tool that meets a few rather important requirements. It must be lightweight, so it can run equally fast on a desktop or a less-than-powerful Eee PC, and it must be easy to use with virtually no learning curve. It must be able to access data from anywhere – from a desktop machine or laptop as well as any machine via a web browser. Ideally, the application should let you share data stored in it with other users. Also, it should allow you to store virtually any kind of data: notes, calendar events, URLs, recipes, etc. Finally, the most obvious requirement is that you should be able to retrieve the data you need easily.

Failing to find my ideal PIM tool, I decided to write one myself using Python. The result is Pygmynote [1], a simple Python-based personal data manager (Figure 1).

The idea behind Pygmynote is rather simple. The application uses a MySQL database with a table that has only three fields: id (primary key that uniquely identifies each record in the database), note, and tags.

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