Wriging

I use a notebook and a PDA, and most of the time my writing ideas just bounce around in my head until I finds something cohesive.

Hrmm.

I can't think of anything that was made for this purpose ... but ... try Urbis, One Sentence Story, and Ficlets. They have tagging support, so I guess you can turn it into a repository of writing ideas.

Good luck. =)

Backpack...

Have you considered just using a text or Word file and adding tags at the beginning or end of each snippet? You could do this with a wiki as well. Either way, a quick Find or search will scan all of your snippets and tags. It would also simplify the process - the idea of trying to organize snippets of writing into some forced hierarchy system sounds crummy to me. "Should this snippet go in this section or that section? Or should I copy it into both sections?" etc.

With an online system with a "page" for each snippet, in search results, you're probably going to just get the title of the snippet page, or a bit of the actual text. If that's the case, you're going to have to come up with titles for each snippet, which sounds pretty pointless. With one big wiki-page / Word file, cycling through whatever tag word you're looking for, the screen will just jump to where the snippet is, so you can see what it is at a glance.

I spent last weekend at a conference with a girl who was just raving about tiddlywiki.

Thanks, guys. I'm going to be giving these a go over the next few days. Will report back if any of it fits just right. :D

Hey boss
I think your original idea is a great one, use a wiki. Free hosted or desktop. However, I have been experimenting with Zotero recently. It is rapidly replacing my bookmarks, snippets and notebook. It works as a firefox extension and has tag, search and hierarchical navigation.
Really worth a look.
Mark

I've been using dokuwiki with a tagging plugin for my snippets/notes, and I'm finding that it works a treat.

Hi, all,

Just thought I'd write back and say that, after trying all of the suggestions here, Zotero seemed to be the most appealing and powerful, but I still wanted a more online solution to storing my data. (I am one to try to move away from personal hard drives all the time...)

However, all the suggestions here reminded me of a service I tried a long time ago and didn't quite like but thought I'd give a second chance. I have been using Google Docs for a while, but I was disappointed when their poor folder structure came into play. Zoho Writer, however, seems to have improved since I last used it, and I'm quite impressed by their Notebook service as well, which can compile existing Writer documents into notebook-like organization. After some playing around with things, I think I've found this to be the most flexible, and it's online, thus making it possible for me to work on my creative writing, wherever I am with an Internet connection.

Thank you all for your suggestions. I ended up finding some really valuable stuff this way! I'd never heard of some of these sites!

P.S. - One Sentence Story distracted me for well over an hour...

I use Zotero to organize research links and notes and Scrivener (Mac) to organize my stories. For snippets, I use an old-fashioned journal (i.e. paper and ink) which is not high tech, but I can use it anywhere. I use post it flags to color code the journal and choose story ideas from my journal snippets. LyX looks promising, but I haven't installed it on my linux yet...

P.S. Scrivener's site has a writing software link list for other operating systems.