I was trolling through my RSS feeds today, when I came across a link to a C|NET News article entitled “SNARFing your way through email“. The article itself was interesting, but what I found fascinating was a tool available on the C|NET page. It’s called the Big Picture, is powered by LivePlasma.com, and is essentially a map of how this article relates to other articles in the C|NET database. Here’s a shot of the full-screen image:

According to the help screen:

• it’s a way of “connecting the dots between stories, companies, and topics within the News.com site”
• you can “click on a bubble to center the display on that story, topic or company. New connections will be exposed with your selected story, topic or company as the focal point.”
• “The size of the story bubbles reflects the popularity of that story with News.com readers over time.”
• For every story published, News.com editors and reporters included relevant links to other News.com stories. In addition, News.com highlights the important companies that appear in a story as well as attach appropriate topics to each story.

I find the concept fascinating, not only because it provides an excellent service to the reader, but because of how much work must go in to maintaining a database of related articles. For example, some of the links in the image above date back 2+ years! Amazing. What a great way of giving the reader something extra; I love the ability to see other related material.

I was inspired by a post over at the 43 Folders Google Group about people’s computer desktops. I decided to clean mine up and post it. Of course, that required a few hours spent looking at other people’s desktops and spritzing mine up according to interesting things that I’ve found. For example, I was inspired to try out Yahoo’s Konfabulator (again) because it seems that there are so many interesting widgets out there now. Check out my computer desktop and look at everyone’s else’s too. It’s very cool seeing how other people use their systems, e.g., what kinds of productivity software they have running, how they organize themselves, etc.

Whoo hoo! Finally! OneNote has great clipping support when you’re working in Internet Explorer, but no support at all for FireFox users. Now, there’s a new extension designed for FireFox, which will allow you to send a clip from FireFox to OneNote. Check out the description at The Office Weblog.

I was checking out Slacker Manager yesterday and read an interesting post about using a script to quickly append notes to a text file. Now, with the super duper power of EverNote at my disposable, why would I be interested in such a thing? Well, it turns out that every now and then I want to capture information quickly, but don’t want to bring it into my system. In addition, I’m sometimes on a different computer, where I don’t have EN installed. Using a quick scripting way to keep time-stamped notes just might be very useful for me. In my dream world, the only thing I would have to bring onto the new computer would be the script itself - I wouldn’t have to install any other software to make it run.

Now, Slacker Manager makes use of ActiveWords, which I don’t. He used to have his own way of appending quick notes to a text file, but he came across this awesome VBS script by a reader of his, Joshua Fitzgerald. See the original Slacker Manager post for how to download, install, and use the script. Originally, it was suggested that this script would be triggered by ActiveWords. However, I didn’t want to have to install any other software to make use of it. Here is what I did:

1. Create a directory on the temp computer’s hard drive, e.g., F:\Scratch.
2. Download SFS.VBS and put it into this directory. You could use the original SFS.VBS script; however, I like to have a bit more white space in my text file, so I modified it slightly - see this SFS.VBS.
3. Edit SFS.VBS to make it point to this particular directory. Halfway through the file is the line

   filename = "C:scratch:scratch.txt"

   Edit the filename to the appropriate directory. You can also change the filename if you wish.

4. In Windows Explorer, open the directory containing the SFS.VBS file.
5. Right-click and drag the file to the desktop. Windows will ask you if you want to copy, move, or create a shortcut. Select “create shortcut”. Alternatively, you can right-click on the VBS file and select Send To/Desktop from the context menu.
6. Find the new shortcut on the desktop. Right-click it and select its properties. Choose an appropriate shortcut key (Shortcut tab). I chose Ctrl + Alt + . for the script file. The Ctrl + Alt is mandatory, you just get to choose the third key. I wanted something on the right-side of the keyboard so I can hit Ctrl + Alt with my left hand and select the third key with my right.

Now, to create a new entry in the scratch file, just hit Ctrl + Alt + . and the popup window will open. Type in text and hit Enter. The really nice thing about Joshua’s script is that it is smart enough to capture text from the Windows Clipboard, so if you just hit Enter, the clipboard contents are entered into the text file.

Finally, the scratch fill will just keep getting bigger and bigger, so it would be nice to archive it now and then. In a few days, I’ll post a batch file that will simply rename the current file so that the next time you call the script, you get a new, empty one.

I had a comment the other day asking for more information about categories and auto-categories. The response comment got a little long, so here it is as it as its own post:

I’ll assume that you’re already reading the help pages and skimming the forum for help with categories. That said, here’s my take on categories:

• Categories are shown in the left pane. There’s a few that are provided to start you off. The concept of categories is similar to creating directories in Windows. They’re just a way of organizing things, in a tree-like hierarchy.
• Let’s say you have category A. To create a new child of A, right-click on A and select “New Category in A”. Voila, new child.
• Categories can be dragged and dropped to move them where you want. Do take care because EN sometimes has the habit of accidentally moving a category - I notice this more when I’m using my laptop’s trackpad instead of a mouse - too sensitive I guess.
• You can also right-click to move a category. Right-click on it, drag it, and select the option “Move…”
• With right-click/drag, you’ll also notice the option of “Copy…” Doing a copy actually makes a shortcut category, with a little arrow beside it. These are actually pretty cool; it’s just a way to duplicate a category in another location. The only caveat being that if you delete the original category, the copy also disappears. However, if you delete the copy, the original stays.
• There are several ways to assign notes to categories. For example, if you select several categories (using the Ctrl key to select more than one), and then create a new note, the new note should have all the selected categories. I prefer doing it another way. I usually create a note, and then drag the category name to the note. Do this several times to add several different categories. There’s also ways of using the category stamp icon (in the note header bar), but I find that too annoying. It is the only way I know of remove a category from a note though.
• The advantage that EN has over any other note-taking software I’ve tried (notably TreePad and OneNote) is the ability to have one note be placed in multiple categories. I love this feature.

Category Intersection Panel

• This is another of EN’s greatest strengths. It allows you to filter out notes based on the intersection of different categories. Think back to high-school math and Venn diagrams :)
• To enable the category intersection panel, go to Tools/Options/Category and enable the “Show category intersection panel”. It will be in the lower-left corner of your EN.
• The image below shows a snapshot of my category intersection panel when I select my @next actions category.

• I have 13 next actions. 1 of them is also a @Calendar note, 1 is also a @Waiting note, 2 are also considered To Do Single notes (which means they’re using the To Do Single Template) and 4 are Misc To Do notes (which means they have [ ] in them somewhere).
• These last four are all grouped under the GTD category. I also have the Autocategories category that came with the EN installation, and the Keyword category. Further down the list (which you cannot see) is a Projects category, and the intersections listed under that tell me what projects have NAs associated with them.

Autocategories

• Another fine aspect of EverNote is the concept of automatic categories, i.e., having a category assigned to a note based on the template that the note is using, or on some keyword, or on the date that the note was created, etc.,
• To set an autocategory, you create a category. Then, right-click on the category and select Properties. Go to the Filter tab. The following screen shot shows the different kinds of things you can filter on.

• I tend to just use the keywords. I also make use of the To Do state. The best way to learn about them is to just experiment.
• One nice thing about keyword autocategories is that you can filter on more than one keyword, so if you want to collect those notes about ‘chicken’ and ’soup’, you can use both words (just separate by space). On the other hand, if you specifically want ‘chicken soup’, just type it in surrounded by quotes.
• The only thing I don’t actually like about autocategories is that notes that are categorized by autocategories are not actually considered categorized by EN. So, when you look at the “Uncategorized” category that comes with EN, any note that you haven’t manually assigned a category to will be shown there. I find this annoying, since I like to use the Uncategorized notes as a bit of an inbox.

Hope this helps! Remember that the help pages, as well as the support forum, are a great place to get more information.

Categories: evernote