Digital Meanderings
Meanderings of a coder

Lately Wiki’s have taken over my life - my team at work uses one, I’ve started one to share content from Ars Technica’s Boardroom and I’m even tempted to install TiddlyWiki on my USB drive!

For work, I’ve been using the wiki to store my meeting notes. I take my tagged notes and then transfer the most important ones over to the wiki. Great for sharing and for the if-I-get-hit-by-a-bus scenario! The problem is that the same subject matter can span multiple meetings and I like to break up my notes by meeting. So I began searching for a way to aggregate a bunch of single pages into one gigantic one. After a lot of searching I found a way to do it, unfortunately I lost the link but I do remember the instructions.

Below you’ll find the steps needed to create an aggregate page. The examples use the Boardroom Wiki.

1. Create a new page. This page will become the aggregate page.
2. Find the title of the pages you wish to aggregate. To do this I normally just copy the link and take the portion of the URL after the title=. For example the title of the following link http://www.theboardroomwiki.com/index.php?title=Business_Cards is “Business_Cards.”
3. Edit the aggregate page. Insert the following tag: {{:PAGETITLE}}. Be sure to replace “PAGETITLE” with the title of the page you’ve selected. Example: {{:Business_Cards}}.
4. Click the save button and voila!

My main issue is that there seems to be no way to group the individual pages on the aggregate page. I would expect the aggregate page to use the title from each individual page. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be case. Sure I could create my own group by adding a header before each instance of the aggregate tag, but this is a pain.

Another problem I have is the manual nature of this tag. Each time I want to add a page to the aggregate page, I have to do it manually. I’m not sure what an elegant solution to this problem would look like but I’m sure there’s one out there.

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Well it seems that spring has finally arrived here in South Dakota and that means spring cleaning. Since I don’t own a home nor do I rent a garage, spring cleaning has always taken on a digital flavor for me. Here are some of the things I do.

Bookmarks
If you’re like me, you tend to bookmark a lot. Especially those websites that you don’t have time to read immediately but would like to check out later. After a year of saving those websites and all the other sites that I found interesting, informative, funny or just bookmarkable I have collected tons of bookmarks. My solution? Transfer my bookmarks to del.icio.us.

del.icio.us has been around a while but here are some tips to make your life easier:

• Download the new del.icio.us extension for Firefox. This extension syncs your bookmarks with the ones stored on del.icio.us.
• Clean-up your tags. It’s very easy to add multiple, similar tags. This can be very confusing when you’re searching for something. So take some time now and consolidate your tags.
• Get rid of unused bookmarks. In this age of virtually unlimited storage it’s very easy to keep addind and adding. Unfortunately this leads to a ton of extraneous bookmarks and it adds time when you’re searching. Take some time now get rid of these unused bookmarks.

In order to keep your bookmarks more organized in the future, be sure to organize them as you go. Review your tag list before you select one. After you read a bookmarked site for the first time, decide whether to keep it or not. If you keep it, make sure the tags you’ve selected are related to the site. If you choose to delete it, delete it now!

Files
Each year hard drives are getting larger and larger. We have online storage, network storage, CDs, DVDs and more. With all this storage space it is very easy to keep everything we download from applications to documents. Do you really need all of this stuff? Nope it is just taking up space so clean it up now!

To make spring cleaning easier for years to come, organize your files as you download or create them. I recommend downloading your files to the same directory every time, but please don’t use your desktop!

E-Mail
A lot of articles of this type explain how important it is to keep your Inbox clean. If you’re using Outlook or Thunderbird this becomes extremely important. Inbox folders grow very quickly! I recommend switching to GMail. It allows for tagging which allows you to easily organize your emails. Unfortunately Gmail’s tags lead to the same problem as we encounter with del.icio.us. So make sure you go through those tags too!

Do you have any other tips for spring cleaning for the digital age? Post a comment!