Publishing a database as website

Posted by Tester
Aug 18, 2015 at 09:51 PM

Donovan and Alexander, thanks for your friendly words. I am happy that my posting and the examples are of interest for you. :-)

Thanks also to Bill for his information about possible solutions for Mac users.

Some time ago (before starting to work with MyInfo) I had also tried various Wikis. Unfortunately I also could not find among them a really satisfactory solution too. The by far best Wiki (for my needs) was - and remained - “PBworks” (http://www.pbworks.com/). It is a hosted Wiki, so you need not install any software on your computer - all takes place directly in the web. But I do not know if they offer any longer the possibility to create a (free) Wiki as it existed when I started to work with it.

In general, with the Wiki of PBworks the result is excellent concerning the speed (o.k. my database there is not very big) and it is - in some fundamental aspects - excellent concerning the search possibility (especially in case that you want to publish a dictionary or something similar where the keyword search pays an important role). But in practice it is also the search feature that has some important shortcomings (perhaps not so interesting for most of you that it is useful to describe them in detail). These shortcomings were the main reason that I decided to stop for the time being the systematic work with this Wiki (though occasionally I still add another keyword). The formatting work is considerably bigger than the procedure MS Word—-> paste into MyInfo (or another outliner)—-> export as html/website. I would be willing to do this additional work, but only if I were fully satisfied with the result respectively the usability of the database/Wiki on the website. And that is not the case.

You can find my Wiki here, but only filled with about 3500 keywords: http://enalexiko.pbworks.com/w/page/60853998/Startseite
The search field is in the top right corner. You can test it for example by typing the letters ABH or ANTR (not case sensitive). A drop down list opens from which you can choose one of the (German) keywords containing these letters. Very comfortable (but unfortunately with some weak points too).

Concerning Connected Text: I had tried it also some time ago but the handling (especially formatting etc.) was by far too complicated for me. ;-)
I had also tested the function to export the data as a website. Instead of a tree Connected Text offers an index with all document titles in alphabetical groups. It can be seen also in the chm file linked by Alexander. As far as I remember there was no additional search feature. So I fear that with a large number of documents (let’s say about 20.000) this index page would get monstrous. ;-)

So at the moment on the one hand I still hope for some spectacular changes (concerning web export) in MyInfo’s next major upgrade and - as a potentially attractive alternative solution - I will continue to have in mind RightNote with its Webbook feature.