November 14, 2004
MarkBernstein.org
 

Lists For Use

Fraser Spiers complains that Tinderbox has the graphic pizzaz of an IC layout program. Of course, that's the point: we're not trying to be pretty. We've got a lot of work to do; pizzaz is fun, but the work is what matters.

For example, take that list of sites I mentioned yesterday. We'll put the short title of the organization in the note title, and we'll put the main URL in the URL attribute.

Lists For Use

We can turn this into a blogroll instantly, with a simple template. And we can make everything in this list have a common prototype, *protoOrganization, so that the URL will be a key attribute. We'll add an action to the container so the prototype is assigned automatically.

What we've done, really, is to build a smart personal application for our personal research. It's taken only minutes to set this up. If our work changes, it's not a huge investment; we've lost five minutes. But if we spend any time at all on this, we'll save lots of time by getting the information down, ensuring it's organized, and keeping it flexible and open to change.