HOWTO: Store notes online and offline

I have mentioned on this blog several methods of storing notes so that they're available both online and offline. Since when online I usually have a browser open, it seems logical to seek browser-based solutions to the problem. The problem then was how to make these same notes available when offline. So far none of the services I have tried offered all the features I wanted.

Help is here, though, because I have thought of another method and am trialing this now. I won't go into a long explanation as to why I'm trying this method or how to set it up but simply present my current solution:

Installation Method

1. Install Dropbox client
2. Create a subdirectory in the Dropbox directory to contain the notes

Storage of notes
Individual notes are created as plain text files and stored in the "notes" directory (or a sub-directory).

Searching
Use the command-line tool 'grep' to search notes' content. An optional feature would be to added specially mark-up "tags" so that you could search by tag, finding matching notes. Example tags could include "todo", "project", "howto".

Formatting
While the notes themselves are plain text files, an optional extra is to use the Markdown markup method to apply formatting. When viewed in a text editor they are still easily read but when viewed using a Markdown viewer, their formatting makes complex notes more legible. One method is to install a Markdown viewer in your browser, give each note with Markdown markup an ".md" extension and associate files with an ".md" extension with the browser. I can then easily browse my notes in a file manager and easily view their contents.

Although I am using Dropbox in my current experiment, I could use a FLOSS alternative.

The beauty of this approach is that it is cross-platform, since each component is itself cross-platform.