Organizing What You Find - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 251

it to write this chapter right now!) It allows you to open several diferent text
iles at a time. What I normally do is create one ile for whatever I'm work-
ing on at the moment, leave it open, and toss in information as I ind it. hat
way I know that everything I need is in one ile at any particular time, and
from there I can write up a Web page, a report, or an e-mail, and copy-and-
paste it where it needs to go.
he ability to copy-and-paste my text and not have to worry about format-
ting weirdness is the primary reason I use this method of organizing infor-
mation instead of setting up a Microsot Word ile or some other program
that uses non-ASCII formatting.
And text iles are usually small because, well, they're just text. And even
when you have a big text ile they're usually manageable. I've thrown multi-
megabyte iles at UltraEdit and they've been handled ine. When I need to
take text iles somewhere, I put them on a lash drive (a very small portable
hard drive; you oten see them on keychains or lanyards). I can carry them
knowing I don't have to worry about special coniguration iles or whether
or not a diferent computer has a particular program. (If worse comes to
worst, Firefox will open a text ile!)
UltraEdit isn't free; it costs $39.95. But if you want to try something a little less
expensive, there are lots of free text editors available, including EditPad Lite
(editpadpro.com/editpadlite.html), NoteTab Light (notetab.com/ntl.php),
Cream (cream.sourceforge.net), and Metapad (liquidninja.com/metapad/).
another portable option: wikis
he ability to toss a text ile on a lash drive and head out the door makes
keeping data text-based very useful to me. But there are other portable
information options as well. here are wikis, which are structures that
allow groups of people to add content collaboratively. (You can get more
detail about wikis and their history at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki.) Can
you imagine if something like that was portable? TiddlyWiki, also known
as WikiOnAStick, is available at tiddlywiki.com. It allows you to set up a
wiki that's portable on a Flash drive, and which you can open and edit in
a browser. In fact, the instant you open the TiddlyWiki home page, you've
downloaded the sotware ( Figure 13.1 ).