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.

Giving Dave Winer's new OPML Editor a try. It is cross between an outliner and a blogging tool. You can see my new blog here. At the moment it comes with free hosting but make the most of it because Dave has wisely made no commitments.

As a tool it looks like an update of Radio Userland. It supports html markup which is pretty much a must-have these days.

Posting through the editor is very quick and easy, I could be tempted by it, or maybe a way of importing the OPML into Drupal? I'll have to think about it. OPML is a nice file format, XML and all that, not proprietary or a binary black box.

It supports a kind of public outline which you can share with your buddies or, my preference, use to dump notes for home or work.

It is interesting, I'd play some more but unfortunately I've got to do babysitting

Latest candidate in my pursuit of the ideal Outliner is TreePad. This is the most appealing so far:

• two-pane outliner: tree hierarchy on the left, node contents on the right. Simpler than Microsoft OneNote with it's confusing mix of tabs levels.
• The node contents are rich text that can contain formatting, images, tables (unlike OneNote) etc. Node editor is virtually a word processor.
• Nodes may contain hyperlinks to executables, web pages, other nodes in other treepad documents (unlike OneNote and better than leo's cloning which only works in the context of a single document). Hyperlinks go in article body, unlike Leo where they go in the tree node title, not a good place to put it in my opinion.
• Tree nodes may have an icon associated with it. Leo loads it's selection of icons very slowly.
• Not the fastest program I have used: the help file is a 5M treepad document and takes a good time to load up (1.5G Centrino).
• Simple installation: one of it's features is that it can be installed on a USB flash key and carried around. I haven't found a licence agreement yet to tell me if it has to be licenced on each pc it is used on.
• Robust encryption. Dare I trust it with my credit card numbers and passwords?
• Can export in many formats including XML, OPML (which strips internal hyperlinks), html-ish files parsable by python. It is important to me that data can be extracted from any proprietary file format.
• Documents can be exported as entire websites, complete with Javascript driven tree. Kinda tempting to examine the possibility of organising a website around with this, carryng it in pocket, publishing it, searching it, refactoring it, writing it to pdf... I find blog notes the best place to record things but web interface is not the best editor. Could type stuff in here and bulk move it to the blog.

It is commercial (£20 ish) but it is very polished (unlike Leo).