Why should I use erminder?

There are countless apps and web sites out there for helping you keep track of information of all kinds. There are birthday reminder services, appointment reminders, document management, note-taking systems, desktop search engines, task lists, and much else. But erminder stands apart from all of these because it is addressing a different problem, and doing so with a different approach.

What it is, and what it isn't

erminder will manage one-line notes for anything. Think of erminder as an evolutionary way to deal with mental notes.

erminder is not a document management system--it is not a good way to store lots of information about a few things. Instead, erminder is a great way to store a little information about a lot of things.

To best understand the inspiration behind erminder, just read the following story from erminder's creator, Jeff Handley.

A frustrating week

When it rains, it pours. I don't remember the exact circumstances that led to such an inconvenient week, but I clearly remember the frustration that resulted.

I recall that early in the week, we ran out of vacuum bags and the house was only half vacuumed. This prompted a trip up to Walmart to try to track down the style of vacuum bag that I had written down on a post-it note, but after searching for 15 minutes through unorganized piles of bags I realized that none of my Hoover Type Y bags were on the shelf. I tracked down an employee who proved to be no help at all. On to the next store I went. This repeated for a couple of stores, before I finally found the bags I needed about 90 minutes after I had left the house.

Later in the week, I realized it was time to replace the whole house humidifier's filter. After visiting every store in town that might possibly sell such a thing, I finally concluded that I'd have to buy the filter online. At that point, the world's best search engines failed me and it took me way too long to find an online store that actually had the exact filter I needed. I bookmarked the site and hoped that the next time the filter needed to be replaced, I'd remember that I could just click the bookmark and place the order.

After feeling so defeated by my humidifier, I realized that I was probably overdue for replacing several other filters around the house. All told, I needed filters for:

It took me an entire day to track all of these filters down, and I ended up finding each of them at a different store. Of course, when the first store only had one of them, and no others, I left empty-handed and sure that the next store would have everything I needed. I couldn't have been more wrong, and I had to visit a couple of stores more than once because of it.

When the filter I ordered online showed up at my house, I finally felt a little satisfaction. I had done it, I had managed to replace all of the filters around the house. That is when the inspiration hit me to create the service now known as erminder. I never again wanted to drive from store to store to store, with post-it notes of model numbers and styles and sizes.

This has happened to you

While you might not have had the filter day from hell like Jeff had, you know you have struggled to find replacement parts before, and you've wished for an easy way to keep reminders for your parts, what they are, and where you've found them.

Initially, this service's name was going to be "PartReminder," but immedidately after completing the first feature for storing and recalling notes, we found that the problem is much more general. In fact, the 2nd note stored in the system was Jeff's wife's regular order at Chipotle, so that Jeff wouldn't accidentally order her burrito with lettuce ever again. And after the realization that the service could manage any one-line notes, the new name was chosen, and erminder was born.