Peter's Blog

I have some ideas for the note-taking and organising tool I want. My thoughts have been inspired by Dave Winer's OPML editor.

I started blogging as a way of organising notes but that has gone in an awkward direction: I write mini-articles and this takes time. What I am thinking of is the ability to just chuck down a sentence or two, maybe a web link, and just store it. Associated with these jottings would be a few tags that would enable me to organise them. The jottings would not necessarily have titles, I don't want to waste time thinking of a title. The intention of all this is to be light-footed, nothing to slow down the process of using it: the main reason I don't take down as many notes as I should is that I can't be bothered. The OPML editor is close in terms of being able to bang down notes with no titles but I have yet to explore it's categorising/tagging facilities.

One way I could use the OPML editor would be to compose an OPML file full of each days notes. I don't want to mess with a different file for each thing I work on, I'd rather use categories/tags to do that. At the end of the day the OPML could be consolidated into Drupal or whatever for archiving/viewing/editing as ultimately OPML is not a database. Posting articles directly into Drupal is too laborious, especially over the net: I don't want this to take more than a second or so. Another advantage of storing the articles in Drupal is that I can use my wilki syntax to add syntax highlighting.

I have to think about this some more.

Update: from the OPML Editor notes:

The core purpose of this program is to create outlines and share them with other people, in various forms.