I’m a big fan of Yahoo! Notepad, so here’s an idea to improve it

I always like to write down stuff because it helps me to be a bit more organized and helps me make sure that I don’t forget something. So, I end up using Notepad.yahoo.com heavily. I usually add/delete lot of notes regularly – the reason is I try to keep consolidating the notes from more to less number of notes. One day, I got frustrated, and I setup my own private wiki in a hidden part of my website and I was using it well ; but I ended up accessing my mail, calendar and address in Y! but using a separate wiki instead of notepad. So, here’s where my idea/feature request comes in… why not make Notepad wiki-like!

My suggestions:

• Use an extremely simple syntax like Markdown. Ability to link to other notes of mine makes it so useful!

• Give a choice of having to print either the raw format or the converted HTML format. Both choices are useful depending on the situation.

• This gives more incentive to use Notepad. I would definitely expect more people to use Notepad if such a neat feature was provided.

• Brings in lot of geek cred!

The basic idea, however, is to bring more structure to my notes, without significant overhead.

The announcement is finally out (ok ok, in blogosphere terms, I am late but still…), Yahoo! is dedicating hardware and providing resources for Wikipedia.

They’re also providing details fetched from Wikipedia when you search for cities, etc. in the international Y! search portals. Looks like they really were listening to the discussions on the internal mailing lists

I hope they are going to provide a Wikipedia search similar to the Creative Commons Search, that would lessen the load on Wikipedia as well as give better searching capabilities.

Here’s my weird-but-yet-interesting idea of the day…

In most mailing lists (including non-geeky ones), HTML mail is usually discouraged but the newbies still want to make use of bold and italics and the rest.

So, here’s my simple solution:

Allow the user to use a rich text box to get all their HTML-coolness but instead of sending raw HTML, send across the text formatted in Markdown syntax.

The advantage is that the recipient actually has a choice of seeing a plain text view or a HTML fancy view. This also encourages “clean mails”. Power-users will like this feature as well.

P.S. Of course, Markdown is not the only choice of semantic text styles, there are many choices such as reST, Textile and the plethora of wiki syntaxes. I just find Markdown to be the simplest and most readable of the ones I’ve used.

I write all my posts using Markdown and it has never gotten in my way of writing and yet works well. That says a lot about its good design.

Ever have the feeling that you don’t have control of things?

I compare it to lots of paper planes flying around you. You observe the whooshing sounds, you observe the patterns of flight, but you can’t concentrate enough to count how many planes there are or even the directions in which they are travelling…

What direction do I take, what do I really want to do, and the biggest question of them all – “What if”….

I’m in a disconnected state at the moment, just like this post.

The only thing that feels comforting right now is the ‘Smooth Jazz’ radio channel …