Back in 2003, James Janssen tried to get me hooked on wikis--or at least he would continually share his unbounded enthusiasm for wikis. Now, in 2005, I'm a self-professed wiki junky. Graduate research did what James couldn't: give me a reason to need a wiki.
I'm using MediaWiki to keep track of information pertaining to my research. The wiki is indispensable. I'm particularly fond of being able to maintain loosely organized blurbs of information with very little effort. Previously, I kept notes in text files on my hard drive, but I'm finding that much less effective than dumping everything in my wiki.
However, I still have a need to keep some notes on my computer and not online. For this, I discovered tomboy. Think of tomboy as a hybrid of post-it notes and a wiki--or even just a personal wiki for your desktop. I'm finding it useful for lists of things (todo, blog ideas, little inspirations, etc.) It's a little irritating that tomboy doesn't get reloaded automatically across gnome sessions, but I'm sure that bugfix is just a matter of time. (Gentoo folks: It's in portage, so just "emerge tomboy".)
Here's to you and your wiki.
Posted by enigma at August 17, 2005 02:47 PMHeh, cool!
I think the beauty of wiki is rapid freeform content creation; 1)write now, 2)refactor later. Make sure the interface doesn't get in the way of #1.
Tomboy looks rather interesting, I can't wait to emerge it on my new notebook in a few days. (currently running on a basic windows install as I my harddrive died 1 week before the machine was to be replaced).
Info on Tomboy on sourceforge is sparse, I had to dig to find the homepage. Looks quite promising as a personal info tool:
http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy/
You inspired a conversation with royord who has been looking for such a tool. Through that conversation I decided to quickly test a local install of snipsnap (http://www.snipsnap.org). Could also be an effective and more portable personal info wiki/blogging tool as its written in java.
I think this space is going to be interesting to watch, as truely all of us are overwhelmed with the amount of information we process and gather. I am constantly stuck in between tools... between social bookmarks, personal blog, wiki's, local text files and documents, palm pilots (dont' seem to want to use that much anymore) etc...... aaaaaahhhhh
Need to simplify our digital lives.... wait scratch that. Need to simplify our lives.
Posted by: jamesj at August 18, 2005 04:55 PM