Digital Notes Organizer – Making Your Personal Encyclopedia

In this video, I do a basic explanation of the Introduction, Tool Overview, Installation, How-To, and Bonus section. In addition, a brief look and what you will accomplish by the end of this course.

Why should you use this software? After all, the methods you've used for notes and research have worked so well for you before. In this video, I will answer why you should use this software and take this course.

Learning can be tedious, so I want to try to spice things up to make it more engaging.

XAMPP, pronounce 'schamp', is a wonderfully powerful tool that allows us to have a server running on our computer, which is a key component for MediaWiki. The installation is simple, but I will provide you with some critical settings to edit to make the most of what you need from it.

All things on the internet is a server and a database, and in order to have wiki software on our computer, we need to configure a database first.

Now we install the software that will give us our Digital Notes Organizer and Personal Encyclopedia. As simple of an installation this is, it helps to know what each portion is so you can decide the best way to make use of this.

Now that we know how to setup XAMPP on our computer, now we need to integrate that with Dropbox, so we can use this on multiple computers.

Our wiki is a tool for our notes and encyclopedia, but who says that we have to keep things the way they look? This video shows how to change the look of your wiki.

The vast majority of what you will do with your wiki will be featured in this lesson and the next one. Pay careful attention here, so you can properly format your information to make it more digestible for your needs.

It's important to format your text, but it is also important to label your information, so not only can you absorb it more easily, but additionally find it faster.

There are rules in how we use titles, from what characters are used to what to do if we wish to change the title. More importantly, a suggestion on words that can be mean multiple things.

The sidebar is a handy tool that we can customize with things we visit it most often, rather than searching for it or going to it a long way.

This is a very important video, which allows our notes and encyclopedia to be integrated, which will help build ideas.

As great as links are, they don't always fit into our text. Piped links can fix this problem to add to the immersion of our page.

Just like Headings, this helps organize our information by the page and group them together. This can help us with organization and even backing up.

Who likes just text and nothing else? Certainly not me. A picture can help break up the monotony of our page.

While I've discussed backing up our wiki in a previous video, this is about backing up the pages themselves. This is very good to do, but the method we use for backing up can actually be used to expand our pages from other wikis.

The bonus section to this course may well go over a lot of things, for now will primarily focus on Extensions. This video will go over how to install extensions.

If there was one extension greater than any other, it would be this. This extension can automatically link your articles with other articles, saving you lots of work.

As you evolve in your usage of this wiki, you will no doubt have articles that reflect your early usage versus your later usage, and may want to edit those pages towards your new style. The next two videos will help you do just that.

As useful as categories are, it is too easy to forget to do them. This Extension makes it easier to use them.

There is a lot to this Extension, and while it may be simple, it's usage may well surprise you.

There are many Extensions included with MediaWiki, with this being one of them. This allows you to take videos from all the major video sites and post them within your pages.