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Escaping from The Brain
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Posted by Vincek
Mar 27, 2013 at 08:36 PM
Graham, thanks for your amplifications. Everything you say confirms that I need not bother even trying out TheBrain.
I will continue to use Evernote as my dumping ground for information. I will continue to wait and see until a synthesis tool (like TheBrain, CT, Devon Think) truly INTEGRATES—not just interfaces—with Evernote.
Your situation (unfortunately) paints the picture of the difference between true integration and interfacing. Arguably, TheBrain “interfaces” with other programs, but in your case the process involves dealing with 9000 unnamed HTML files. What good is that?
Vince
Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 27, 2013 at 08:56 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>If you do not have attachments, but only notes within each thought, you
>might try experimenting with using the selection function and copying
>“text outline with notes,” and see if there is some way to make that
>work. You wouldn’t do it with the whole brain, but in smaller chunks.
>Probably not really any better, but worth a little experimentation,
>maybe.
I wonder if with that option CT’s auto-link function could be used somehow to re-link the files automatically.
Posted by Graham Rhind
Mar 28, 2013 at 01:33 PM
@Dr Andus
Thanks. I didn’t know Directory Opus could batch rename a file to the name of it’s directory, so though that’s not a complete solution, it may be a help! I did intend asking the question on the CT forum, but I wanted to ask here first as we CRIMPers tend to have a better overview of how different tools work together.
CT’s autolink function is a little too unrefined for this operation because the project is a glossary and contains a great many topics/thoughts with titles which are words used in many other contexts, such as post, mail, file and so on. In previous attempts to take things into CT I found it quicker to link manually than to unlink what CT had incorrectly linked.
Graham
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
Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 29, 2013 at 12:03 AM
Graham Rhind wrote:
>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.
Graham, thanks for sharing your process flow, this stuff is always good to know. The “flattening” trick in DOpus is a good one, I haven’t thought about that…