What is the best application to organize a talesman’s work?
Organization, thought Bardelys, was a hobgoblin.
He was looking through the Internet, searching for some means to organize his matter. This meant a tool that would:
- Organize his tales
- Make a journal of his writing
- Make a journal of his farming efforts
- Collect and organize all the random bits of information he found on the internet each day, in some form that would be easily searched and catalogued.
In addition, Bardelys considered, the application should run on all platforms, or at least MS-Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux. It should deal with files of standard format that did not take up too much space. It should allow for some ‘prettiness’ — Bardelys was not normally given to liking tools for the sake of their looks above their use, but some fanciness in a file helped its readability. Indents for such divisions as blockquotes, for example, italics and bold, and headers (which should help with navigation).
Now, what had he found?
To begin with, there was http://www.openoffice.org. Its main drawbacks were no tagging ability (a minor quibble, and no deal-breaker for Bardelys), and that its navigator could only show all levels up to a given point: it couldn’t hide some level 3s, for example, while showing other level 3s. Also the navigator pane did not allow for block-level editing, in the sense that it didn’t allow its user to copy or delete a whole block. This function was available if one used a master-document, but the master-documents had their own slight problem, in that they could not edit subordinate linked documents directly; instead one had to open the linked documents in a separate process. Also the application did not have a calendar function, which Bardelys loved as a navigational tool.
Then there was http://www.celtx.com an application intended for screenwriting and movie scheduling. This was based, amazingly enough, on the Mozilla foundation’s Firefox browser; truly a tribute to what could be done with XUL and open source tools. (Bardelys shuddered to think what would have become of Netscape had Time-Warner-AOL had kept it proprietary and closed; no doubt there would have been an end to development, and security holes would have forced almost all its users to abandon it.) Celtx was too new, and yet, and yet… it had some tagging, it had calendaring built-in, thanks to its Lightning component. He meant to try it, although he was fairly sure that his uses were too far from its intended use, and it would prove in the end unsuited for him. There was another problem in its file format. Bardelys didn’t know what it was, and couldn’t find anyone who could tell him. He imagined that it was compressed, a group of files, probably in html or xml formats, and gathered in a bundled and compressed using zip or gzip compression algorithms.
Another approach altogether would be to use a collection of separate files in a single directory or folder, and sub-directories within that. They could even be text files, should Bardelys be willing to forego all markup (a slight compromise would be to use one of the plain-text markup formats, that could then be transformed into html or some other format — multimarkdown came to mind, along with xilize and text2tags). jEdit was a java-centric cross-platform text editor with plugins that handled projects in this way, and worthy of consideration.
Then there was the wiki. Oh, many forms of wikis! But TiddlyWiki and its offspring were tempting. Some had built-in calendar plugins, all had tagging. The form could be edited using a modern browser (Firefox again!) and was a self-contained bundle of html, ajax, and css. The problem with TiddlyWiki was that it was so big. The ‘empty’ template file ran a few hundred kilobytes these days, and took a while to load. And that was before Bardelys added his own information. On the other hand, each instance of TiddlyWiki was its own file and program, in a sense: Bardelys for his journals might make up a separate file for each year, or each quarter, or even each month.
Getting back to http://www.openoffice.org he might choose a Text document or a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet held its own divine terrors for Bardelys. The thing could be so powerful, it was tempting. And yet Bardelys had never gotten the hang of spreadsheets. This began decades ago, in the 1980s, when Bardelys chose word- and text-processing over spreadsheets. This was in the days of CPM, and later, DOS; Bardelys had not yet worked on a Macintosh and had no familiarity with the GUI. In those days, the spreadsheet was for numbers only, and for accountancy, really. There was no appeal there for the talesmen of the digital realm.
He knew he might cheat, of course. He might choose something like Scrivener, the wonder word-processor for OSX. It wasn’t cross-platform, but it was wonderful, and could back up its projects in multimarkdown plain-text markup, which could then be compressed further to save space for backups.
Treepad, now — he had forgotten that one. Long ago, years back, in another age (truly! for came before the fascists wrote finis to the Republic of the United States), Bardelys had used Treepad to keep track of what he had found interesting on the internet. Treepad had a wonderful way of organizing. It was plain text, of course, in its Mac and Linux variants and imitators. But it was a while since Bardelys had looked … maybe some new Treepad variant had arisen…
Bardelys hunched over his keyboard and launched Firefox, and went searching once more.
Truly, hope springs forever in the limitless world of cyberspace.
(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, July 29, 2008)
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