1 clipping, 6 items (re tagging "vs." outlining)

Posted by 22111
Jan 31, 2015 at 01:49 PM

spin-off of http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/5721/0/organizing-lots-of-thought-snippets since I realize in that context, it IS ot.

“I agree that a single outline hierarchy can become unwieldy. [...] tagging [...]”

As readers interested in theory and better practice (the latter asking for the former as a prerequisite, and yes, there are even outliner bloggers who ain’t interested, but that’s their choice and their business, the web is full of such things which ain’t thought out, or where even the attempt to think a little bit about the subject you’re writing on, has never been made, and will never be made either - I find it very amusing that 99 p.c. of those sites are done in the usual blog tools, i.e. those thinking-avoidance-inclined authors also seem to refrain from learning some bits of html et al., by a presumed-by-me majority), you will remember that I wrote quite a lot about “outlining vs. tagging vs. how to combine it perhaps to best effect”.

You will also remember that I said, multiply your outlines (even within some big db, but then you need better fractionizing functionality than is currently implemented in UR e.g.), then recombine them again (which, within the big-db concept, is very well realized in UR, but not so in MI e.g. - no details here since I gave them before, it’s just a reminder).

But in my previous writings (where I explained the superiority of the outlining concept for many, but not all, application cases, I left out one other very important aspect which I would like to mention here, where it’s far from ot:

In fact, the op asks for the best ways of organizing thought snippets; I acknowledge that most of the time, these would be rather short and rather not connected, so order / outlining / ordering within outliner parent items is far from mandatory here - ok, there is always the aspect of how and when to do sub-groups whenever such lists-of-equals get too long.

But as for web clippings, e.g., not only do I preach (as you know) plain-text (plus pics/tables in case), but without all the surrounding, unwanted things, and then do your own formatting, and I call this “clipping hygiene” - and it’s a relief for your further work whenever you really DO something with such clippings later on, instead of just collecting them.

Also, I regularly do cut off longer web articles and such into a main outlininer item, together with some more child items (which are automatically called “ditto” if I don’t use the dialog to give them more specific names); for one because I hate vertical scrolling, at least when it’s more than just ONE dn / up again, and also, to better separate distinct ideas in the original text, better than the original author technically did this (perhaps because he didn’t want to multiply sub-pages: bear in mind that in an outliner, navigation between siblings is very easy by kb, whilst most web pages are too lazy to make available kb navigation, and thus multiplication of short pages is usually very cumbersome). (alternative a)

The same applies to technical pages, i.e. programming help pages, where there is one question, followed by several answers: Once it will have become just a selection-and-then-1-key thing, it’s a pleasure to gain, by doing so, much better access to your information than you had before (alternative b)

Then, I often bold some these sub-items since (for me), most of the time, some of them are more relevant than others (but which ain’t irrelevant by that: those last I would leave out altogether). Btw, it’s also this my splitting up info that has risen my items’ number to a six-figure number, and thus this is relevant info to put that last number into perspective (cf. several thousand margin numbers in a 600-page legal textbook: it’s perfectly adequate, but you must know what these numbers mean in order to realize they make perfectly sense).

Now let’s reconsider alternatives a and b. Only in SOME cases of b the original order is meaningless: Even in most cases of several answers to one question, at least some or one of the answers will refer to an answer “higher up” in the list, so even then it makes sense to not mix the original order up, and all the more so almost any case of alternative a, i.e. an author developing some ideas or presenting some facts, i.e. in the order in which he decided to present these facts, and even if you leave out paragraphs (irrelevant, or irrelevant for you(r means)), original order is valuable information you would not want to sacrify…

but that’s exactly what you would do if ever you had the (in that context, very bad) idea to put any clipping into several items in your IMS; in other words, this extremely helpful means of even further optimization of IM

(i.e. by speeding up visual access, and also, by more precise cross-referencing (which in most outliners where it’s available to begin with, is possible only on the item level, not on the paragraph level (where MI excels, but those cross-references don’t survive any export, hence their reduced usefulness if you’re not willing to spice them up with some more code of your own ( cf. http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/5083/47 ))))

will simply not be available in a tag-based environment, whilst it’s one of the aspects in which outlining really shines; combine this with specific cloning (i.e. not of the respective parent item, but of one or several of those sub-items you will have created, and cloning into different targets contexts of any one of those sub-items), and you will come quite near a really optimized IMS in what currently available solutions offer (cf. my threads here re cutting up info and then recombining it again in multiple ways (individually optimized for your purpose in question) and the fact that no current solution to resolve this dilemma can be called “near-ideal” (cf. 1-, 2-, 3-pane outlining, let alone alternative realizations).

(Since “slatibartfast/ianb (here)” alleged, over at DC, that my English is so poor he doesn’t understand what I say (or then, my English is so poor I did not even understand what HE said), please feel free to ask me whenever some of my ideas may appear obscure to you. (And people who are mentally into witch hunts, burning and stoning, should seriously consider physically joining some (recognized or self-declared) state in a region of this earth where they could freely act out.))