Working With Wikipad: A Tool For Managing... Stuff

One of the things that I've been lacking for quite some time is an effective way to keep notes electronically. I am almost completely paperless at this point, except for legally required documents, but one of the key problems with keeping things electronically is... keeping track of data. Where once I had layers of notes running around, now I have little text files that I started up arbitrarily. Things I am willing to make public get put on this site... things that aren't were in scattered files that wasted space, cluttered my desktop, and had gotten to the point where I needed to come up with a solution.

For the last decade or so, I've been repeating over and over that information has depth. For example, I'll want to write something here at KnowProSE.com - but I'll need to lay groundwork in other entries. The same thing that happens on the site happens on my local machines as well.

In browsing the TTCS OSSWIN CD, I came across WikiPad. I've been using it for 2 weeks now, and I can find things all in one Wiki that is maintained locally on my machine(s) - and easily transferrable between them. And, I can toss links to files on my local machine, which Wikipad keeps track of for me once I create a reference to it.

How it's used is simple; it revolves around 'WikiWords' - it takes some getting used to (and they aren't defined in the documentation). Basically, a WikiWord is a word that starts in upper case and has an upper case letter in the center- so while 'Contact Information' is not a Wikiword, 'ContactInformation' is. By typing that in, it generates a link in Wikipad so that you can click on it and add more information.

I've been using it to keep track of projects I'm working on related to code, experiments, and even personal contact information. What it also does is allows you to export all the information as HTML files, so you could put them on a website, a CD, or something similar.

I'm not often impressed with applications, but Wikipad is not only original, it's very useful and allows me to keep track of information in ways that make it searchable, and also allow me to connect data in ways that I think that any computer should. After all, information has depth - and depth is relative. All that, and an original application that is Open Source. Brilliant!

Thanks to the developers, and thanks to the Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society for pointing me at it. The next test will be on Gantt Project.