Recently I’ve come across some useful software to help organize my information, lists, etc. It’s wiki software, like that used to build the ubiquitous Wikipedia and many other sites. But unlike the encyclopedia and other online wikis you won’t get idiots putting spam or misinformation into your wiki, because this kind just runs as a local application on your PC (or Mac, in my case — the software I’m trying is VoodooPad).
The idea is simple but useful — type stuff (whatever!), and use links to build an interconnected network of information. But don’t be nervous, this is very easy, you just highlight a word or phrase and click a button to turn that into a link and start typing the page for that link. There is no HTML and it requires no web-building know-how.
I use it as an intelligent notepad or to do list (I’m not a big fan of those onscreen “sticky notes”…argh!). It’s easy to search across all pages, create page categories and you can output HTML files if you ever do want to put it up on the web. I throw everything in there — “books to read”, “notes on how to backup my personal files”, story thoughts and brilliant ideas for this blog (a short section, obviously). If you’re working on a novel (or any big project with a need for documentation), you might want to create a wiki to track of all the details of the world, locations, timeline and characters you are creating. The idea is simple and very flexible, and you can use it in any way you want. The only thing I don’t like is that (if you really want to) you can’t have hierarchical data — every page is considered an “equal”. But this is easy to work around by using categories or else slightly more complex page names.
I’m using VoodooPad on my Mac, but there is similar software for Windows, of course. I haven’t tried any but I did do a search and tried to identify the ones I’d be likely to try first…I’d probably go for ConnectedText or WikidPad. There is also a cross-platform one, but it seems a bit overkill for me…perhaps better suited to organizations managing an internal wiki.
If you’ve tried these or other wikis (on any platform), let me know which one you like best!