PersonalBrain is a great tool for creating associations between topics. However, the posts on thought?horizon which are part of my personal knowledge resources don’t appear in PersonalBrain automatically. This means that if I’m doing research on Topic maps through PersonalBrain and then post here, the post doesn’t appear in PersonalBrain unless I create a link.
Easy to do on a 1-by-1 basis going forward but what about the 135 posts already here?
One option is to link to each individual web page on this site using the permalinks. A positive aspect of this approach is the ability to put my PersonalBrain file online for others to download and link into thought?horizon. But it doesn’t solve the online/offline problem. It is a bit silly that I can’t access my own writings when I’m not connected. And for 135 posts it takes too long.
So through a combination of movabletype and NewsGator I came up with the following solution.
- Create a custom RSS feed that encompasses all 135 posts to date. I copied the existing RSS feed and set lastn=250.
- Subscribe to that feed using NewsGator and grab the latest news thereby creating a copy of each post in Outlook
- Drag-and-drop each post from Outlook into PersonalBrain and associate to other thoughts as I wish.
And as a bonus, each RSS post contains a link to the original posting on the web.