Charles on… anything that comes along

Yeah, it’s true. If you have lots of articles on the go and you keep cutting stuff or want to refer to research materials or want to search what you’ve written.. you want Voodoopad (which comes in Lite - ie free - and Pro versions too).

Voodoopad is a sorta-wiki-like thing, but that doesn’t quite get the power of it, and it did take me a while to understand it myself.

Here’s what happens (or at least, what I do).
* Create a document.
* Create a page within the document. (Documents are like websites - they can have multiple interlinked pages.)
* Type your story. Too long? Create a link in your story (it’s a keyboard shortcut) and put the cuts in there.
* Got an interview? Create a page, type it up. Just leave it there. Or create another new page and start doing your work in it. You can have lots of tabs open so you can flick back and forth between the notes, transcripts and drafts.

Can’t remember who referred to Voodoopad? Do a search. This feature gets more powerful the larger you make your document. Though as Gus Mueller advised me, “back up repeatedly”.

Nice things about VP (as users call it):

• you can export what you’re working on direct to Word, RTF or HTML, or just text
• you can search across all the things you’ve written within a document. So you could write 50 articles, or type in 50 interviews from which you write 100 articles (efficiency!) and if you need to search it to find how often you’ve mentioned “antivirus”, you can, and you’ll get links
• you can embed PDFs and Word documents (and pretty much any sort of text) in a document, and it becomes searchable via the search tool *or* Spotlight.

All in all, it’s very nifty, and highly recommended.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Gus Mueller on watching the money not come in (11 January 2006; score: 64.08%)
• Mac apps are going through a boring stage: all flash, no insight (22 November 2006; score: 30.83%)
• Oh, screw it, I'm going to have to reinstall Tiger. Sod it, sod it, sod it (19 June 2006; score: 23.08%)