Having been a Linux system administrator for two years, I have greatly changed my ways of organizing my computer from the way I started. The linux filesystem is very organized, and I have come to the understanding of how developers and programmers before me have easily organized an entire operating system.

I wrote this essay on organizing, as a means to help me organize my own system and for others. I am a neat freak when it comes to organizing, and yes, my room is fairly clean most of the time also.

A person's computer can only be as clean and organized as one's house. Simply put, if your house is a wreck, then there is no use trying to organize your system. For one, it won't last long. For two, how do you expect to keep your system clean when you can't keep your house clean?

Organizing Ethics

1. When starting from scratch, the first directories that should be created are as follows: bin, media; These are the four main forms of media; text, music, video, and images. These directories should be created under media.
2. Your $HOME directory should remain as clean as possible, and be the quick "drop-off-point" for quickly saving files to be organized after you are done with it. Files should never remain in this directory under any circumstances.
3. Sub-directories should remain clean, and organized. Never leave sub-directories unorganized. For instances, you would not leave 50 random text documents in "text" and have to dig through them later. If 25 of them were quotes, and the rest were letters, you would make two new directories called "quotes" and "letters" and place them accordingly.
4. On some occasions, second layer sub-directories are required. If, for example, you had several years of photos, you would organize them as "media/images/photography/2008/march/19/" instead of dumping all the photos in "media/images/" or sloppily organizing them in "media/images/pics2/other/junk/03/19th/". Not only is that address difficult to remember, it is difficult to find.
5. Scripts do not need to be healthily organized unless you have an over abundance of them. Generally we set our $PATH to include "~/bin" so sub-directories in "bin/" would make things difficult.
6. The standard directory for Apache's mod_userdir is "public_html" in your $HOME directory. Symbolic linking "www" to "public_html" makes things look crammed. Don't sacrifice keystrokes for organizing. Learn the power of <tab> and make use of it.
7. (For Apache Server Usage). When making a new domain/site for a user, don't make the DocumentRoot in their $HOME directory. Instead, proceed as normal and create the DocumentRoot in /var/www/. Now the user of the said site can be given a "sites" directory (useful if they have multiple sites) and you can Symbolically link the site in /var/www to their "sites" directory. This keeps things consistant and well organized. Example: "/home/joebean/sites/mycroft" will be linked to "/var/www/mycroft".
8. All directory names should remain lowercase for consistency.
9. Directories shall not have spaces in their names, and neither shall files have spaces. The usage of underscores, dashes, and periods should be enough for compensation. Attempting to open a file or directory with spaces requires either quotations around the object, or backslashes before the space; Which is difficult for the user. Windows is notorious for this act… "My Pictures", "My Music", "My Videos", etc.
10. Capitalization is forbidden in file names, except for he following files, "README", "COPYING", "INSTALL", etc.
11. CamelCaseFileNames is difficult to remember and is discouraged.