Ok this is currently in testing so I’m going to leave the link off for now - (Since I just put the page up yesterday). Once the dust settles a little bit I’ll put it up to share.
Basically, I added CJD Notepad to my WordPress blog. This lets you quickly add notes into your blog to later convert into blog articles. I have about 60 notes so far. I realized two things. First the system doesn’t scale very well - basically it is pretty manageable for 10 or 20 notes but sixty is a bit of a nightmare. Second, few if any of my notes are ever going to actually convert into a blog article. Most of them are interesting aticles or software that I would like to either check out later or keep track of for a later need.
What the hell do I do?
First off - I realized they already make a piece of software for this purpose - it’s called a Wiki :). Worse still - I already have one Great Withlime Wiki. It took me a little while to figure out why I wasn’t using it and then it hit me. It took too much effort. Frankly it doesn’t take that much effort to get stuff into a wiki - but since I’ve gotton used to WordPress it seems like it takes forever.
This is mostly driven by one simple improvement - the bookmarklet. That little shift that allows me to click a bookmark and quickly post and move on with my life - make all the difference. I know this because the notepad didn’t ship with one and it annoyed me so I wrote one for him :) So now I have a wiki - and I have the same problem - and thus the same solution. I wrote a bookmarklet for the wiki as well.
Basically you can goto a page and click “WikIt!” and it will open a pop up with the title of the page you were looking at and a link to the page you were looking at. If you had highlighted anything then it would put that in the content box as well. You then get the choice of adding the information to an existing page or creating a new page and adding a link to an old page.
I’m going to play with this for a little while and see what it does for my use of the Wiki (Which I used to love and as I went thru it last night I realized I hadn’t posted anything in it since Feb :(
August 4th, 2005 at 9:43 am
Very cool.
And yes I am sure that 60 notes would not scale well as it is currently, I had not written this for that purpose… might be something to look into though.
I would be interested in hearing anymore thoughts you have on Notes, since you seem to have seriously pushed its limits.
I am really digging the site by the way, very well done.