One of the things I’ve been trying to do of late is get into the habit of doing more regular writing. I have no illusions that I’ll keep much of what I write, but I find that writing something on a regular basis, even if it’s dreck, helps to keep the ideas flowing.
And even if most of what I write will never find its way into print of any kind, I want to save it so that I can mine it for possible material. How to save it, though? A few possibilities occurred to me:
- Do the writing in Google Documents. The upside: I can organize things into folders, and anything I put there is searchable. The downside: My Google Documents account has enough material in it already, and though the folder structure in Google Documents has some similarities to tagging, I still find it a bit unwieldy for anything but the simplest forms of organization.
- Do the writing in a private blog, and make sure the blog is Zotero-enabled. The upside: Doing this would allow me to save anything potentially worthwhile to my Zotero library, where it would be searchable and I could make notes on it. The downside: The kind of writing I’m talking about is essentially freewriting. It’s not even to the “rough draft” stage, so I’d rather not share it publicly. I’m all for the sharing of Zotero libraries, including notes (see this post by Mark Sample for a thoughtful reflection on why this is a good idea), but I’ve not yet found a way to share only part of a Zotero library. It seems to be all or nothing; so, since I don’t wish to share this writing, my Zotero library’s not a good place for it. It defeats the purpose of setting the blog as private in the first place.
Here’s what I found that I think will work well for me. I set up a WordPress blog, then installed the Private Only and WP Sentry plugins. The first of those plugins directs visitors to a login form. Since I’m the only one with a login, that keeps the blog private.
The problem I’ve had in the past with password-protected blogs is getting a working RSS feed. Here’s where WP Sentry comes in. It enables me to create a a feed URL that can’t be deduced from the blog’s address. (It’s a little hard to explain; I’d suggest checking out the plugin and experimenting with it.)
I can then take that feed and subscribe to it in DevonThink. The advantages?
- It provides me with a backup of the blog. If anything happens to my host, I’ve still got copies of my posts in the DevonThink database.
- My posts are searchable.
- DevonThink’s unique “see also” feature helps me make connections with other items in my database (journal articles, etc.) that I might not otherwise see. Tagging’s a great tool, but it requires me to see the possible connections. Sometimes I miss things.
DevonThink, unfortunately, is only available for the Mac. I don’t know whether there’s anything similar for Windows or Linux, but any program that can permanently archive RSS feeds would at least permit the saving and searching of posts.
(The image in this post was created by the author and is CC-licensed. This post originally appeared here.)
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11 Responses to Using WordPress and DevonThink together
Doug - September 23, 2009 at 10:12 am
Very interesting approach. You have essentially created a linear html text string (because that what posts really are under the covers, just one long text file) that you tag and sort in DT.
One of the benefits, I’d bet, is that you can post from any machine by logging into your WP account.
I’d argue that eventually you will outgrow the limitations of the single string of text in your private blog.
I once used Journler and then DEVONThink, but I’ve chucked the lot of info manager applications and deployed an organization approach for all my notes using just the file system. There is a touch of Noguchi’s philosophy in the criticality of chronology to the system, and Alex Payne’s ideas, augmented by a few good coding systems.
I wrote about it here…File System Infobase Manager
…and here…
Dating DEVONThink
It feels rather liberating being unhitched from the constriction of an application’s requirements.
Doug
http://www.dougist.com
Bill - September 24, 2009 at 6:50 am
Would it work as well simply to keep a running word processor file (mellel, MS Word) entitled ‘writings’ or ‘journal’ and have that file stored in your DT database? Every day, you’d add to your ‘writings.doc’ and thus all of your writing would be searchable on DT, no?
Amy Cavender, CSC - September 24, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Thanks for the comments!
Doug–your system sounds like it’s something that can work very well, and there’s a real advantage to not being tied to specialized software. I don’t know that it would work very well for me, though. I’m simply not sufficiently disciplined to use a file naming convention or tagging system that consistently.
Brian–it might work for me; I’m not sure. Right now, I like having each of the posts available as individual entities; they’re often on quite different topics, so it works well (at least the way my brain works) to split them up. I’ve never tried using a running longer document, so I have no idea how well that would work with the “see also” function, but it would certainly be searchable.
Amy Cavender, CSC - September 24, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Sorry! Not Brian. I meant Bill! Forgive me–it’s been a long week, and an email from one of the Brians I know came across my screen a few minutes ago.
Doug - September 25, 2009 at 8:35 am
The funny thing is that they are actual one long document now. The architecture of a web page is that all the posts and comments are stored in a single file, along with HTML codes to signify styles. WordPress represents portions of these to you for editing or reading as if they were separate items but in fact it really is managing the display of one long text-like file. Merlin Mann over at 43 folders has written a great deal about using contiguous txt files for unstructured note taking. I believe he uses MMD to manage the stuff. This is somewhat like Bill (aka Brian) was suggesting. There are some folks who use Scrivener for the same purpose, (as discussed on their forums) but I suspect that their data collections will eventual outgrow that tool.
(btw: Nice post)
William Patrick Wend - September 28, 2009 at 4:42 pm
The downside: My Google Documents account has enough material in it already, and though the folder structure in Google Documents has some similarities to tagging, I still find it a bit unwieldy for anything but the simplest forms of organization.
This is a problem I am encountering as well. My solution, for now, has been to move rough draft documents to DropBox and just have them sync from wherever I am at until I am more comfortable putting them into a proper document.
Mike Hickerson - October 6, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Thanks for the tip. I’ve been using WordPress and DT for a while, but hadn’t thought to combine them. (I use NetNewsWire for my RSS feeds, so I often forget about DT’s RSS feature).
DT also lets you create rich text files directly in the database, though the UI is not as nice as WordPress. The new version of DT has a nice “Take Note” feature for quick notes that I like. I just used it to take a few notes while listening to a webinar and it worked great.
Mike Arnzen - October 8, 2009 at 10:53 pm
I use WP on my other blogs (at gorelets.com) and have been manually pushing web archives of every entry into DT via Devon Agent. It works well to preserve design, but takes too much time. I know DT allows “auto importing of a site” but that doesn’t quite work with WP either. Your solution is quite sound: import entries as RSS feeds. DT allows organizing each by title and other separations that can make for associations I don’t think you could possibly make with a long text file method. Thanks for the tips and food for thought.
Amy Cavender, CSC - October 11, 2009 at 9:54 am
@Steve–if you’re always at one of your own computers, you’re probably not missing a thing. The advantage for me is that I’m sometimes at someone else’s computer, where DevonThink isn’t installed. As long as that computer has internet access, I can always get to the blog and do a brain dump, and just let DevonThink suck it down later.
Steve - October 10, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Amy,
I’m not sure I see the advantage of writing in the blog and transferring them to DevonThink, over just writing entries in DevonThink in the first place. What am I missing?
Jake - October 16, 2009 at 11:01 pm
This is a very cool post—I found it via the DevonThink blog. A quick question: have you seen Steven Berlin Johnson’s article about using DevonThink effectively?