news group snippet collection software wanted - free

Posted by Ken Ashworth
Sep 6, 2006 at 07:47 AM

Here’s a good one.

Web Idea Tree - $29.95 - Personal Edition

http://www.webideatree.com

I had mentioned this program in a post to the old Outliners Forum shortly before it went down.

Although this program is primarly a Content Management System for website generation, it lends itself well to many of the tasks desired in an information manager, research and/or writing tool (presentation).

The interface is a typical two-pane display, project (website) tree on the left, tree node detail editor on the right. The right hand pane offers three view modes (tabs) - Editor (rtf ?), HTML Editor, Preview (Rendered).

Page layout and site structure are controled thru Cascading Style Sheets, managment of which is made very easy thru some slick dialogs.

Ten (10) Custom Fields can be defined for a project and display in the Rendered page for each tree node (Idea).

A separate Bibliographic database is available with (40) available fields. These can be saved and loaded, but only one biblio database can be attached to a project at a time - I guess if you had multiple biblio databases you could load one against a project structure - publish - then load another - publish….

Extensive import capabilities.

External database access thru ODBC.

The Editor (rtf ?) has very good table support.

Keyword indexing is automatic, separate biblio index, TOC and Index generation.

I found the program to be very stable. I was getting some program errors after the last update that seemed particular to my system, the author worked with me on resolving the issue - although we weren’t able to pin-point the problem the author did provide a working executable with a different library (compile). I was impresssed with the level of service.

The manual is very comprehensive, and a good example of a site generated by the program.

http://www.webideatree.com/mu-en/text/index.html

Clipboard Monitor function - Toggle - discussion of auto-paste behavior, depended on current view tab focus: as appended within an idea (tree node text) OR appended code to HTML Editor OR as new idea (tree node) in Preview tab.

http://www.webideatree.com/mu-en/text/auto-import.html

Granted it’s not the holy grail, but for the price…

(I’m just a user, no connection to program).

Later,
KenA