Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Are you this type? You go to the grocery store. You're a whiz at doing the
shopping, inding all the bargains, and reading all the nutritional labels.
But when you get home, the groceries end up sitting on the counter forever
because you never quite get around to putting them away.
his chapter is for you.
he most intricate set of information traps in the world will not help you if
you're not able to put your hands on the information you need, and organize
the information you ind in a compelling way. In this chapter, we're going to
look at strategies—lots of diferent strategies—for putting your information
together and saving it. And because most of these strategies involve setting
up client sotware on a single computer, we're going to start with a really
basic, portable strategy. From there, we'll look at computer-based organiz-
ing solutions as well as Web-based solutions.
A Very Simple, Portable Strategy
Most of this chapter is going to cover sotware that you install on a single
computer. hat'll suit most people but not be particularly useful to those
folks who have to move around between computers or check information
traps in several diferent places. here are Web-based options as well, but
for reasons of access or security you may not want to use those. he strategy
I'm going to outline here is really step one—a ground-level option to help
you get started. Later we'll get into more involved options.
the beauty of using a text editor
he most basic, extremely simple organizer is just a text editor. Its big pro
is that plain ASCII text iles are compatible with just about everything (and
they stay compatible—ten years from now you will still be able to ind a text
editor for your ASCII iles). Furthermore you can it a lot of information
in an ASCII ile, and such iles are very portable. he big disadvantage is
that they only store text—they don't store multimedia, and they don't store
fancy formatting (though they will store HTML iles; you'll just see the for-
matting tags instead of the formatting itself).
Text iles are how I do most of my initial information organizing. I use a
program called UltraEdit; it's available at ultraedit.com. (In fact, I'm using
Search WWH ::
Custom Search