Writing.Com General Discussion

I use an application called Zim-Wiki. It is a notepad-type program, but is based on wiki concepts. There are two panes, the one on the left is a treeview of all the pages, and the right displays the current page. You can create subpages simply by naming them with a '+' at the front, e.g. "this line will create a page for +Susan". The word 'Susan' will then be highlighted and you can click it and start editing that page. You can also enter web links e.g. https://www.writing.com - and it'll automagically turn it into a clickable link.

You can also create pages in the treeview if you feel that is easier.

Pages can have images in them - just drag and drop from your files, and you can add ToDo lists. You can add a ToDo on any page and then list al the todo items from the menu - and rank them by priority. Pages are automatically saved on an inactivity timeout (do nothing for 10 secs and it will auto-save), and whenever you navigate away from a page (or close the notebook).

I tend to create a new notebook for each project, and have created templates for character sheets, world pages (economy, politics, technology, religion(s) etc).

The beauty of it is that being able to create sub-pages allows you to organise your notes so things can be easier to find. Being based on wiki technology, you can search for things easily, and you can add a link for any page in the notebook in any other page. It is so easy to use, I've written entire novels in it, breaking it into sections for each chapter, and individual pages being scenes within the chapter. Since it allows you to keep your research within the same notepad, everything is kept together.

It's available for many linux distributions, Windows and Mac. https://zim-wiki.org/

The Zim-Wiki code is based on MediaWiki, which was developed for Wikipedia. I found this so useful that I eventually setup a wiki farm on my network - each wiki is a separate novel. This allows me to write from any machine (desktop, laptop etc) and even using my phone. For this system I used DokuWiki, also based on MediaWiki. Starting a new novel is as simple as navigating to the Farmer page and entering the name of a new wiki (title of novel), and selecting a template to create the default starting pages and structure.

A Wiki Farm is a collection of wikis that use a single instance of the wiki software. The primary wiki is called the farmer and is used to create and delete new wikis, setup default configuration options etc. The wikis created by the farmer are called animals. Yep, it's an animal farm - kinda appropriate methinks. Each animal has a number of directories that contain configuration data - so each wiki can be configured differently - and a data folder. Backing up the data folder (just plain text files and any images) is easy - just copy.

A great feature of having a full-blown wiki is that each time you save an edit, it keeps a copy, so you can always roll-back to any previous version of the document (or just peek at it to see what you deleted/changed). That's priceless.