Franz Grieser wrote:

We seem to have
different approaches:

Not necessarily. I think we may be just talking about a different part of the writing process. I'm still just in the process of analysing my notes (my data), and so jumping to a hierarchy at the moment is not helpful. But once I figured out what I want to say, I will probably be happy to switch to a hierarchical outliner. Having said that, I'm prepared to skip that step, should CT allow me to go all the way to the stage of a publication-ready text. It's an experiment for now, as I'm still very new to CT and wiki-writing. I've been very hierarchical in the past myself (perhaps obsessively so, considering I turned into a contributor on this forum :)

I just wanted to say that you guys were completely right about how awesome CT is. It will probably end up completely replacing Wordpress in my Cyborganize system. I'll have to think about it further. Thanks.

JBfrom wrote:

I just wanted to say that you guys were completely right about how awesome CT is. It will
probably end up completely replacing Wordpress in my Cyborganize system. I'll have
to think about it further. Thanks.

Didn't the use of a blog like Wordpress also have to do with the chronological organisation of texts?

Can Connected Text offer such a perspective of its material?

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Didn't the use
of a blog like Wordpress also have to do with the chronological organisation of texts?


Can Connected Text offer such a perspective of its material?

It can if you include the date in the topic name in the format of 20120319 representing today's date. So you can create an entry for "20120319 - Tom's phone call" and that will show up in your topic list as

03/19/2012 - Tom's phone call

All your topics will then be listed in chronologic order. Additionally, you can select the date in the organizer calendar and it will show all entries thus related to that date.

And there are probably other more sophisticated ways of achieving this chronological overview, but these are the ones I'm familiar with.

Steve Z.

That's a good point Alex. It doesn't sound like CT would do that function very well if you can't natively sort by creation date within a category. I am definitely not going to manually datestamp the beginning of every title.

I had assumed there would be a creation date sort option.

Even so, it can at least replace the second phase, hierarchical wordpress pages.

I'm pretty much over the tree for longform text. The interlinked web is the only structure that makes sense. Durr, look at wikipedia.

Still, I maintain tree over web for text snippet fast sorting. No doubts there.

It's very simple to prove the superiority of wiki to tree for bodies of longform text.

Just count the number of entities to be considered when writing and placing an article.

First, remember that longform text richly interconnects in all directions.

So with a tree, you have to pick one "path" and remember where each piece goes in relation to that path. This leaves you potentially considering the contents of several other articles while attempting to write a new one. This is because the topic is defined not solely by the title, but by the title's place within the hierarchy, the other related titles, and the content included under those titles.

With a wiki, each item stands on its own, pathless, defined solely by its topic heading. Much simpler.

I think this is a major reason why I stalled out on writing cyborganize.org on Wordpress. Geometrically increasing complexity and frustration due to poor info design. Ironic, eh? Or just stupid.

Oh well, I am more proud of my occasional moments of lucid thought, than ashamed of the long valleys of non-sentience between.

I haven't been following this topic closely, so someone may already have suggested this:

Remembering and entering markup language is a pain, so why not use a macro program that allows one to enter markups using keyboard combinations or right-click menu items.

Better yet would be for wiki developers to not only include these macros, but also to hide the markups and indicate them by coloring the marked text, etc.

It seems like CT is based on markup language so you can edit that directly if you NEED to but most of the time you can use menus and buttons and shortcuts. Which is of course ideal.

And very different than all the other wiki solutions I've tried, which are what turned me off to wikis in the first place and made me go for wordpress.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Didn't the use
of a blog like Wordpress also have to do with the chronological organisation of texts?


Can Connected Text offer such a perspective of its material?

One option is the "Last Changes..." window (from the "Tools" menu) which gives a chronological listing of topics by date modified. There are various other possibilities hinted at in the Welcome topic "Using $DATE, $CREATED and $MODIFIED in full text search". (Also relevant is the Welcome topic "Simple History".)

Lucas

JB, what are the other main features you found in Connected Text that are not available in other wikis and discouraged you from using them?

JBfrom wrote:

And very different than all the other wiki solutions I've tried, which are
what turned me off to wikis in the first place and made me go for wordpress.

Steve, Lucas, thanks for the suggestions.

I see that the CREATED and MODIFIED parameters should cover most of the uses I have in mind, but I can see a good reason for using the manual date stamping too: when one is reconstructing a series of events, e.g. for a biography or legal case, the current date is irrelevant. Manual date stamping provides a way to look at the material in an arbitrary chronological order.

The ability to do basic text formatting and linking without typing markup was what impressed me most.

It's possible many other programs do this and I simply screwed up my software review, maybe by focusing on web apps.

It appears indeed that several other wikis have this 'toolbar' feature http://www.wikimatrix.org/wiki/feature:Toolbar as a search in Wikimatrix shows http://www.wikimatrix.org/search.php?sid=4119

I had not noticed or given any thought to this, but indeed it is very useful, especially when one is trying to get others in a team to give a wiki a try. The learning curve with markup can be substantial, delaying the actual use of the wiki for getting work done.

In my case, I am probably leaning towards one of the 'classic' wiki solutions, in particular Dokuwiki which keeps data in plain text files, for the usual reason: my need to collaborate with others.

Thanks Alex for that epically useful link.

Looking at the CT wikimatrix page, I'm feeling pretty good about my decision, particularly its recognition of some HTML tags, which I hope will enable copy pasting from the Wordpress editor pane.

Dr Andus wrote:

While I like this function in both, I find that their organisational logics have some psychological effects. Because Scrivener?s tree hierarchy is constantly in your face, it exerts some pressure on you to have to keep the entire structure and the hierarchical relationships constantly in mind. And naturally as the content changes, the hierarchy might become irrelevant, in which case it demands to be looked at. CT?s wiki logic in this sense is more easy-going, because by packing away a document it is sunk into an invisible depth, from where it can be recalled, however the overall structure doesn?t become a constant, nagging thing. So in this sense I can see how writing in CT can be a liberating experience.

Yep, exactly! Wikis beat outlines for longform text that requires coherent organization and extends beyond a few (maybe 10) pages.