Wednesday, February 28, 2007

As a student...

As a student I've got a problem... there is just so much information out there.

You know when you have a fair bit of knowledge about a topic but there are several big gaps missing? I've encountered this while I worked on a CakePHP site where I often had to search in the documentation as I couldn't get myself to read the entire thing to begin with.

To solve this I started up a new tiddler in my TiddlyWiki where I wrote down the sections in the manual. Then I began skimming though the manual and noted every potentially useful bit of information. There is nothing incredibly new about this study technique, but it works for me. This approach of course requires that you have a project in mind.

What I really would like is some way to attach little notes to places in texts and podcasts, and have them indexed, labeled and searchable. Maybe there is such a thing, a Firefox plugin perhaps?

On a side note I've been working on a few projects, including a CakePHP site and a couple of ASP.NET/C#/VB.NET sites. Also been using my TiddlyWiki a lot, it has even replaced the need for FreeMind to some degree as it is searchable, indexable, has labels and can take really long and formatted texts :)