Escaping from The Brain

Posted by Graham Rhind
Mar 27, 2013 at 06:04 PM

@Stephen Zeoli

You can certainly create a sitebrain from version 7 but it’s not as good or feature rich as from version 6. When The Brain moved to v 7 they marketed improved sitebrain export, but without details, and requests for details in the forum from many people went unanswered. I downloaded and tested version 7 and found that, in fact, a number of features had been removed. (The Brain have a policy of pushing people to use their hosting service because they’ll charge for it). When I posted to the forum my results and made it clear (politely) that I thought it was bad policy, my posting was removed, which is also not good policy. I honestly can’t remember the details of which features were removed, but as 95% of my use of The Brain is for website creation (e.g. http://www.dqglossary.com) I had to stick with the version that gave me the best results.

@Vincek

You can get data out of The Brain, it’s just not well thought through. ConnectedText, for example, also exports to html, but all topics are exported to the same directory with the html file named after the topic, which makes importing it into other programs easier. The Brain’s policy of exporting one (same named) file to a folder with the thought name make the whole process much harder - either they haven’t thought it through or its deliberate. I do sometimes find The Brain as a company a little sneaky and it makes me nervous, so although the product is fine as far as it goes, I’m always very wary about any updates or changes (often bugs removed in previous version reappear in later versions, and they often release upgrades to a new (paid) version without being willing to clear the bugs in earlier versions - version 6 still has plenty of bugs, which have been reported but will not be dealt with) so I don’t trust essential data to it and I would no longer recommend it to other people. I’m moving away from it slowly. (Slowly, mainly because of data lock in ...)

Graham