Escaping from The Brain

Posted by Graham Rhind
Mar 28, 2013 at 07:45 PM

I’ve spent the day on various forums and can provide some information more about how to get files from The Brain into ConnectedText.

1) In The Brain go to the reports tag (without filter), choose “refresh” and this will select all thoughts (though it only shows 5000 per page). Choose Edit->Add Report Results to Selection, then Export->To folders. This exports all the thoughts to a directory, with a sub-directory per thought, each containing an html file with a default name: PersonalBrain Notes.html

2) In DirectoryOpus (or equivalent), with a bit of experimentation, you can rename all the exported thought to match those of the sub-directory (which are named after the original thought title).

3) Also in DirectoryOpus (or equivalent) you can “flatten” the directory structure and then copy all the files within the sub-directory to a new directory, because CT can’t import from nested directories, only all files within a single directory.

4) Import all html files in that directory into CT.

This created a CT project which has topics with all the same names as in The Brain’s brain, and which retains all the html formatting and the external links. Work remains in making the project more CT compliant - adding categories, creating internal links, giving it a hierarchical structure and so on, but these steps do make the process less daunting and painful.

Graham