ConnectedText versus Ndxcards

Posted by Ike Washington
Oct 19, 2007 at 12:29 PM

Derek Cornish wrote:

>Does
>anyone use CT and Zoot together on a regular basis, and if so, for what purposes? And is
>WhizFolders living up to its promise of providing a useful intermediate authoring
>stage for CT and Zoot before one has to move into MS-Word?

The core of the current version of my knowledge system consists of a locally hosted personal wiki which uses Mediawiki, the wiki application behind Wikipedia, working together with Zoot.

For me, Mediawiki is a better solution than CT: it’s open source, comes out of a huge community of developers, powers Wikipedia so isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon. I explain how I’ve set it up here: http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/524/0/wiki-tool-for-windows-and-mac

But setting up Mediawiki is a bit of a pain. I can see myself using CT. Its feature set looks great, compares well with Mediawiki. They both provide the same kind of wiki capabilities.

I use Zoot for accumulating data on particular topics. What I particularly like is the Zooter - allows me to add notes, comments and keywords as I read from the screen. The keywords ensure that the note ends up in the relevant folders.

The wiki is for long-term notes which evolve, grow into substantial essays over time. As well as the advantages of using a wiki - good for brainstorming, easy to access since it’s just another tab in Firefox, a way of collecting information to be used like LEGO bricks to create something larger, what I find useful here is that I can see how these changes have occurred, can go back in time, see how my thoughts have developed.

I combine, rewrite in NoteMap; the resulting piece of writing is archived - as a blog post, wiki entry or published article.

In any case, it’s available through my local search engine, DT Search, as are the wiki, zoot and notemap entries.

I really wanted to use WhizFolders - but its functions, at least in the ways I wanted to use them, overlapped with Notemap and Zoot. I’ve juggling too many windows, tabs as it is. And I’ve become accustomed to Notemap.

Ike