By Martin Stut, 2009-05-23

For about 9 years now I'm using a set of linked HTML files as information storage. As an editor I use the little known Amaya. Being the testbed of the WWW consortium, it produces the cleanest HTML I can think of.

HTML files are great in portability (synchronize the collection with your USB pen), access granularity (place less public stuff in a less public subdirectory, protected by .htaccess or similar) and longevity (HTML will probably still be readable in 20 years by then current software).
Searching can be done classic search engines like ht://Dig, although that won't work on a netbook. A desktop search engine might help, but I don't like Google search because of privacy concerns and Windows search because of it's power requirements.

What I feel making them hard to use is the relatively large effort required to add a new page. I need to create a new page, create a link to the parent page, edit the parent page, create a link to the child page and only then I can start writing down my quick note. To me, that kind of effort is acceptable when adding documentation about a stabilized component to the corporate intranet, but not for 3 lines about a twist that might or might not work.

After 9 years of continuous information adding, some stuff needs to be reorganized. But with HTML files, this is inadequately hard, at least without the right tools, none of which I found up to now. Perhaps I'll program some of them sometime. If I just want to rename the file name of a single page, I need to find all pages that have a link to the to-be-renamed page and change the link in every single one of them. If I want to move 15 pages into a different subdirectory, that's more of a project than a quick maintenance task. This needs tools.

Does anyone of you readers have any idea where to search for tools?