[support] Evernote DB - full "corporate brochure" thread in useful form

Hans Henderson hans.drupal at gmail.com
Wed Jun 13 05:12:43 UTC 2007


Evernote, even the freeware version, is a "web/email clipping database tool"
that allows for very quick creation and tagging of "knowledge snippets" in a
form that allows for very quick retrieval either by category navigation or
keyword searching. It also preserves layout and links to the original page.

In other words, an EXCELLENT tool for anyone looking to capture the wealth
of information available here in a much more useful form than its current
container. (If your knee just jerked defensively in response to the implied
criticism, please see the end of this post).

I've already clipped most of the Handbook and a lot of the rest of
drupal.org and am in the process of tagging/categorising it.

As a demonstration, I have broken the (very valuable but overwhelmingly
disorganised, just like drupal.org as a whole) "corporate brochure site
recipe" mega-thread at http://drupal.org/node/31896 up into logical pieces,
categorised it (on vs off topic) and for the on-topic contributions, broken
out summaries of the various pieces (Navigation, Front page, About, Contact,
Products, News, Theme and of course Miscellaneous).

The result of this work (a 75 kb zip containing an Evernote v2 .enb file),
is attached.

And of course if anyone else is inspired by these ideas and would like to
share Evernote clips by email, please do contact me.

------------
To the founders and long-serving members of the drupal community PLEASE
DON'T take this wrong (I'm just a well-intentioned noob here, and one that
loves what you all have so selflessly created in drupal) - but:

I honestly believe that Drupal (at least in the way it's implemented here),
is not a great tool for storing such a large set of contributions from such
a large set of different people over time without a dedicated central
editorial team organising it for easy retrieval by learning noobs such as
myself.

If Drupal could (can) be set up to do even most of what Evernote does, well
I don't know how to express the joy I'd feel without being obscene :)

In the case of the drupal.org, I can certainly understand the communities
desire to eat its own dog food (it is a website after all) but the
knowledge-hungry dog (ie people wanting to enter the community) would be
much better served if the information were stored in a more accessible form.
(See others' comments on search - hey why not just leverage off Google, put
that as an option right in the core search features? And yes of course I've
doing 99% of my searching there using "site:drupal.org")

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that drupal.org actually does a disservice
trying to be the premier demonstration site for people coming to learn about
drupal. If people could quickly find what they needed during their climb up
the learning curve, I reckon Drupal's use would skyrocket. {Hey wait a
minute, maybe making Drupal so hard is being done intentionally to cut down
on "noob overhead", the lazier/stupider potential users are eliminated in
the first hundred hours of trying to figure Drupal out?}

And yes, of course once I've gotten over the learning hump and actually
start using Drupal in my work, I plan to contribute as much as I can afford
to in whatever ways I can (not being a coder) - to the documentation team,
testing etc.
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