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bLADE wiki - another great desktop wiki for quick notes
Posted by ClifNotes, Nov 2008, permalink Notes and Reminders
Last week, I reviewed a free portable desktop wiki called NoteBook. One of your fellow readers wrote in a comment on the review and told me he loves bLADE wiki.
| Here's what Le Seaman said: |
| Another good personal wiki is bLADE by Dale Lane. It can run on Windows desktop or Windows Mobile Pocket PC. The different versions can even by synced. The desktop version can be run as a portable application from a USB stick. This is one of the best and easiest to use I've found. |
Since I'm a bit of a wiki fanatic, I had to try it. I agree with Le Seaman. There's a lot to love about bLADE wiki. Here are a few things I found after trying it a few minutes.
- It automatically opens a wiki in your Local Application Data folders (bad)
- You can change the default location for wikis and bookmark them (good)
- It uses Internet Explorer as a rendering engine to display pages (good and bad)
- It creates wiki pages in HTML format (good)
- It offers quite a few ways to tweak the wiki markup code (good)
- It offers a way to customize the look and feel of the wiki with CSS Styles (good)
- The wiki markup codes are very simple and can be learned quickly (good)
- You can display local or internet images in pages (good)
- You can embed HTML into the wiki to customize pages (good)
- You can embed web gadgets like YouTube videos in pages (good)
- You can export pages or the entire wiki to HTML (good)
- You can't edit using a WYSIWYG editor (bad)
As you can see, the good far outweighs the bad. I give bLADE wiki two thumbs up. The only personal desktop wiki that I like as much is StickWiki, since all that StickWiki requires is a web browser to use.
click to expand picture
Quote from the website
bLADE Wiki is a personal wiki to let you take and manage your notes.
It runs on Windows and Windows Mobile - and can sync between the two. Or you can run it on Windows from a USB memory stick. Either way, take your information with you - wherever you are!
Wikis are a great way to take and organise your notes.
The syntax is simple enough that it doesn't take too long or get in the way of getting your thoughts into the wiki, but powerful enough to make attractive and well-organised notes.
There is something about a wiki that seems to lend itself well to the ubiquitous capture mentality of GTD.
bLADE Wiki is a lightweight app that lets you capture and organise your thoughts, and so makes a good companion to a GTD system. Some of the features, such as backlinks, were provided to make GTD implementations easier.
bLADE wiki website:
http://dale.lane.googlepages.com/
See also, StickWiki, TiddlyWiki, Pepys, WikidPad, CourseForum, NoteBook and ZuluPad.
