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Escaping from The Brain
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Posted by Graham Rhind
Mar 27, 2013 at 05:03 PM
Because of The Brain’s policy of emasculating web output from The Brain in favour of using their cloud service, I’m stuck with version 6 and its idiosyncracies and weaknesses mean I want to move a 9000 thought brain out of The Brain and into ConnectedText. The Brain’s export functionality is somewhat limited and, again, idiosyncractic - for example, exporting to folders creates folders with the thought’s name but with each containing an html with a default name, so importing each html file is a chore. Exporting to simple html equally exports to a structure which is difficult to import elsewhere.
Have any of the bright sparks on this forum experience on how to export from The Brain and import to CT, even if using a middleware program to do so? The idea of manually altering 9000 pages of imported data is somewhat daunting!
Thanks in advance (and in hope!)
Graham
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 27, 2013 at 05:24 PM
Hi, Graham,
Can you explain what you mean by “Because of The Brain’s policy of emasculating web output from The Brain in favour of using their cloud service”?
I don’t have much experience exporting to a Site Brain, but I just tried it with my 2000-plus-thought brain and it seems to have worked fine. It’s not as pretty as the actual brain, mind you.
Here’s a link to a PDF with two screenshots showing the same active thought, one in TheBrain and one in the exported Site Brain:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/155244/TheBrain%20and%20SiteBrain.pdg.pdf
Certainly the Site Brain is more sparse. Is that what you’re talking about? I’m not trying to refute you. I just want to know what is lacking in the Site Brain export.
Thanks!
Steve Z.
Posted by Vincek
Mar 27, 2013 at 05:35 PM
Graham, Thanks for pointing this out. In another concurrent thread, several people talked about the virtues of TheBrain and I have been evaluating trying it out. http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/4813/0/information-conveniently-captured-in-evernote-now-what
Lack of 1) data portability, that is 2) simple and easy is a deal killer.
Posted by Graham Rhind
Mar 27, 2013 at 06:04 PM
@Stephen Zeoli
You can certainly create a sitebrain from version 7 but it’s not as good or feature rich as from version 6. When The Brain moved to v 7 they marketed improved sitebrain export, but without details, and requests for details in the forum from many people went unanswered. I downloaded and tested version 7 and found that, in fact, a number of features had been removed. (The Brain have a policy of pushing people to use their hosting service because they’ll charge for it). When I posted to the forum my results and made it clear (politely) that I thought it was bad policy, my posting was removed, which is also not good policy. I honestly can’t remember the details of which features were removed, but as 95% of my use of The Brain is for website creation (e.g. http://www.dqglossary.com) I had to stick with the version that gave me the best results.
@Vincek
You can get data out of The Brain, it’s just not well thought through. ConnectedText, for example, also exports to html, but all topics are exported to the same directory with the html file named after the topic, which makes importing it into other programs easier. The Brain’s policy of exporting one (same named) file to a folder with the thought name make the whole process much harder - either they haven’t thought it through or its deliberate. I do sometimes find The Brain as a company a little sneaky and it makes me nervous, so although the product is fine as far as it goes, I’m always very wary about any updates or changes (often bugs removed in previous version reappear in later versions, and they often release upgrades to a new (paid) version without being willing to clear the bugs in earlier versions - version 6 still has plenty of bugs, which have been reported but will not be dealt with) so I don’t trust essential data to it and I would no longer recommend it to other people. I’m moving away from it slowly. (Slowly, mainly because of data lock in ...)
Graham
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 27, 2013 at 06:21 PM
Graham Rhind wrote:
@Stephen Zeoli
>
>You can certainly create a sitebrain from version 7 but it’s not as good
>or feature rich as from version 6. When The Brain moved to v 7 they
>marketed improved sitebrain export, but without details, and requests
>for details in the forum from many people went unanswered. I downloaded
>and tested version 7 and found that, in fact, a number of features had
>been removed. (The Brain have a policy of pushing people to use their
>hosting service because they’ll charge for it). When I posted to the
>forum my results and made it clear (politely) that I thought it was bad
>policy, my posting was removed, which is also not good policy. I
>honestly can’t remember the details of which features were removed, but
>as 95% of my use of The Brain is for website creation (e.g.
>www.dqglossary.com) I had to stick with the version that gave me the
>best results.
Now I seem to recall you mentioning this before… either here or I read your comment on TheBrain Forum. This is, indeed, bad policy on their part and quite disappointing.