Collect Articles In A Database

By Gunter Gerdenitsch
Posted Sunday, August 29, 2004

Your computer is not only your "gateway to Cyberspace". You can also make use of it LOCALLY. A good example is collecting articles in a database. So you can retrieve them purposefully when you want to recall an idea that you read sometime, somewhere.

Living in times of the Internet is in many ways fundamentally different from what our parents thought to be "the right way of living". One of it is the abundance of information you get by articles in newsletters, ezines, etc.

Once I read a good analogy: "Living on the Internet is like drinking water from a fire hose. If you don't know how to do it, in the end you are wet all over - but you are still thirsty." Or, to turn back to reality: Many people will have opted in for a great number of newsletters, ezines, etc. But when they receive it in their e-mail, they just scroll over it, reading perhaps a few paragraphs (more would be too hard for reading on screen), and finally deleting them. At best they stow it away on a heap of other articles, "in order to come back to it later, when I have time for it!" Some months later it is still untouched, the heap has grown too large - it all is deleted. (So, what was it stored for, anyway?)

Some time later those people might encounter a problem of which they just can recall: "I remember, in any article I skimmed over a good solution - if I only could remember which article ... !" But even if they could remember, it would not be of much help either. The heap of articles has been deleted meanwhile, the solution is lost. (Or, to stay in the above picture: "They are still thirsty.")

A remedy to this is, to store the articles in a compact form - so you don't have to feel guilty to use up too much of your storage space. And store it in an organized way - so you can retrieve the one article among thousands within a few minutes.

1. Store it in a COMPACT form.

This is something that we tend to overlook at first. But in order to get really useful, such an archive will usually grow over many months or years up to a number of (many) thousands of articles. Though a modern harddisk usually has several gigabytes of storage space, a responsible computer user tends to feel not so good when he/she sees how much of it is occupied by the article archive. And it's still going to grow more by the time!

Therefore, after many trials with more sophisticated text processors I found the simplest of all to be most expedient one. Now I store my articles as mere .txt-files. Thus an average article is taking only some 3-6 kilobytes, i.e. the total archive size becomes noticeable on a multi-GB harddisk not before many thousands of articles are in it.

Simple .txt-files have some additional advantages:

With more sophisticated text processors you can have all kinds of problems when copying and pasting an article combined of text, hyperlinked URLs and images. A simple txt-processor takes only the text, ignoring everything else.

Every Windows-system comes with at least one simple txt-processor ("NotePad"),
modern Windows even with a processor that can handle txt-files plus some others ("WordPad"). To follow a link out to the Internet, you just have to copy it in the txt-processor, open your browser, paste it into the "address" field, and press the ENTER-key. If you use a txt-processor like "NoteTab" of Fookes Software, you can even follow a link out to the Internet directly. (You can download a free light-version of "NoteTab" from (http://www.notetab.com/)).

2. Store it in an ORGANIZED way.

First you have to make up your mind, what aspects of living on the Internet are relevant to you. I, for example, decided for storing articles on "email", "web site design", "copy writing", "home business" and many others. With the number of archived articles becoming larger, it might be useful to introduce sub-aspects. For example, "email" might be split up into "spamming", "sig lines", etc.

One aspect that I find especially interesting is what I called "Living on the Internet". In it I store every article that's not so specific to fit in with any of the other categories. Articles dealing with aspects that somehow determine the living in the times of the Internet in a broader sense.

For the file name under which to store an article, I usually copy the article title. Thus I can be fairly sure that when I am searching among the files the file name reflects the meaning the author wanted to highlight. Sometimes, however, the author exerted some fantasy for the title of an article; it has not so much a FACTUAL but rather a PERIPHRASTIC title. For example, evidently an author wanted to appear creative when calling an article about spamming: "The Mixed Blessing". When I would search for articles on 'spamming' in my archive some time later, this article would be overlooked. So I added that keyword for the file name: "Spamming - the Mixed Blessing".

I provided a line "keywords" beneath and the end with some suggestions as to the top level and some sub-categories. Thus it should be easier for you to decide in which category to store this article. In addition, I strove to find a title that includes a number of the keywords. (That's similar to 'net copy writing' as needed in web site design to make a web site "search engine friendly".)

About the Author
Article by Gunter Gerdenitsch, owner of '1st Components Design', Universal Software Components for Computer Applications without Programming ((http://www.1st-components.com), nobrmailto:gunter@1st-components.com/nobr). 1CD offers a product line called "DLG" for building applications without programming. BR This article is free to be re-printed, if complete with this resource box. It can be included in a web site if the URL mentioned above is linked to (www.1st-components.com).