Tinderbox and Categories
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Just when I thought I’d fought off the temptation to look
at more software, Mark Bernstein has a new OS-X release of Tinderbox,
a hypertext program I bought a couple of years ago and never found time
to explore thoroughly. I liked its approach to handling “messy
information” through a variety of views — a graphical map, outlines,
linked folders and more. I thought I might use it to sort out fieldwork
notes, especially if I made major revisions to my dissertation or a
follow-up study.
Now more people are using Tinderbox for weblogs, and some are doing things with content categories or, as another Bob puts it, “thematic content.”
At the same time, I’ve been planning to add a taxonomy or category system to my own main Radio weblog
to make it more useful as an archive for class lecture notes… so I
guess I’ll be taking another look at Tinderbox, which also exports to
Radio.
For now, I’m using this Harvard blog for notes related to our Thursday meeting topics (blogging tools, politics), and using my Radio blog for notes that I might mine and link to lectures or assignments in some future teaching job. But I’ve been very sloppy about it. For a while I was thinking the Harvard blog could consist of brief versions of entries from the other blog — a low-tech, but too-high-maintenance way of giving RSS subscribers a choice of how much content to see in their aggregators. I’d still like to offer that kind of choice, but there must be a better way…
