Reflexive outlining with several outliners

Posted by MadaboutDana
Oct 20, 2011 at 06:15 PM

Fascinating. I’m glad to find I’m not the only one who uses multiple outliners/applications to write things - I’ve always been rather embarrassed by this, because I often find myself playing around with ideas in several different programs (my favourites - currently - being TreeSheets, UV-Outliner, Noteliner and a number of different iPad applications, including OmniOutliner, Numbers and MagicPad). I usually end up by transferring the text into a single application, and from there into Word for final formatting/client output.

I save web data in a number of different places, too: again, my current favourites are (on the PC) Local Website Archive - I use the free version - and (on the iPad) Notebooks, which can import pages from URLs. I also save web pages to an intranet set up in Plone, which has some powerful search functions (and is now very easy to install, thanks to some great work by the developers of version 4.0). We also run an intranet based on Kerio Workspace (you may remember we were early beta-testers), but the search function in Workspace is still rudimentary, so it’s not a great place to run fast searches (no hit highlighting, apart from anything else!). I’m toying with the idea of experimenting with Microsoft SharePoint for storing bitexts - you can install the 2010 version on Windows Home Server 2011, apparently, which would make for a cheap but very powerful solution if it all does what I think it does (Search Server Express comes with SharePoint built-in, I’m told, plus hugely enhanced search features - I’ve not had a chance to experiment with this yet, but will certainly report on it when I do).

I used to use the Scrapbook extension for Mozilla Firefox for storing web pages - it’s very, very good - but now use Chrome almost exclusively. Which means I’ve tried to like Evernote, but for some reason find it very annoying.

Another powerful search engine for personal use, capable of searching through and displaying many different types of documents as web pages, is the IBM Yahoo version of OmniFind. We use it to index e-mails internally; the only negative is the need to trigger indexing manually. The search results are Google-like, and as I say, you can preview documents in HTML format directly from the server, which saves a lot of time.

Sorry, this has turned into more of a general ramble. But I’m encouraged that the CRIMP mentality may actually have some creative value, too!

Cheers,
Bill