How did I not know about this?  Years moaning over the inability to affix tags and notes to word and excel documents to make file browsing more coherent.  Years of making lists and documenting and organizing my creative pursuits in unwieldy Microsoft folder systems.   How did I not know or even consider that someone with more code intelligence than I had already tackled the problem?  HOW?

Can you tell I’m broken up about this?  I am both frustrated and excited.  So this is how it works.  Somehow, in the midst of looking for something else I found code {4} lib.  And I thought, ‘Wow, this is a fabulous online journal on stuff I’m professionally interested in, in speak that’s a little over my head’ – which translates to: learn new things LeEtta, go go go!   code {4} lib is also a blog, conference, community and listserv.  I promptly subscribed to the listserv because I could find no other way to feed information from code {4} lib into my head and I didn’t want it to be forgotten in my plethora of bookmarks.

The listserv lead me to The Brain -a mind mapping software that allows for mapping and organizing files and thoughts, interrelating those thoughts, adding notes and tags to those thoughts, and finally, making everything searchable.  It’s fabulous.  The introductory webinar recording (oh, and they have live webinar question/answer sessions weekly), mentioned a few other products.  One of these was FreeMind – an open source and free mind mapping software.  FreeMind is also nice enough to list out alternatives so I’m not going to go into them here.

I’m thinking of trying out The Brain‘s free version/trial.  It looks a little more like what I wanted to do with my filing system to make it more navigable.  But I’m kind of inspired by FreeMind‘s 2D-ness.  It would’ve been indispensable when I was trying to map out a choose your own adventure story.  That was a clunky challenge.  I’ve got another one in the works, so…I will explore.  And, I’ll probably report back.