I began my open notebook 3 years ago on OpenWetWare.org (OWW). Before that the lab was using a private wiki provided by OWW for about a year and a half, so choosing the wiki for my public notebook was natural.

The wiki was perfect (at the time) for what I needed. I had a place to keep reliable notes, I could learn HTML, CSS, etc easily, and I could mold my notes however I saw fit. The wiki was a blank canvas and I was the artist (at the time I was not angling to be a designer but the analogy works well).

As my notebook expanded I began to grow frustrated with the wiki’s style. In order to insert a table I had to code the HTML or CSS for it every time, and I used tables frequently. Whenever I had to make a new page (every day) I had to record the page’s url so I could keep track of what was on each page. As I added content, I had to categorize pages so that I could provide some semblance of navigation. If I misspelled a category or even used a different case (capital vs lower case) that would create a new category which would fracture my content.

I found myself frequently searching for my own content and turning up nothing even though I KNEW I had written something. It became tiresome.

Luckily, OWW expanded capabilities and cloud technology was developing. I used Google Docs for tables and would just embed them in my notes so I didn’t have to write new HTML code every day. OWW developed a notebooking platform that would create new pages chronologically as you needed. And I learned about dynamic page listing which could track almost anything on the wiki in whatever fashion I needed. I could make a page, and tag it with a category, and DPL would only list whatever I specified. Thanks to Bill Flanagan (who was (still is?) the Senior Tech Developer of OWW back in 2010), I was able to get the features I desperately needed in OWW.

Eventually I soured on OWW. It became difficult to keep my notebook organized. DPL couldn’t keep track of everything and going back chronologically took way too long. What’s more is that in order to keep my notebook pristine both organizationally and navigationally I had to create templates that would do most of the work for me, but even then I was still doing a lot manually. Every day.

The reason is because a wiki inherently has no organizational structure. Look at Wikipedia. It’s a great resource, but you can’t just go to the main page and browse articles. Lucky for the world, that the first hit for a search term on almost any subject takes us there otherwise no one would ever use it!

At this point (around May 2011) I was already relying on Google Docs for a lot, and other cloud software (Friendfeed, Youtube, Evernote, BenchFly, etc) for everything OWW and Google Docs couldn’t do. I decided to go all cloud and organize it all via Google Docs.

At the time the idea made sense. Docs are easily searchable, and organizable. You can create folders (categories) or even add some buzz words to each doc that would act like tags when you search. The design was very much like email, so it is very intuitive. I could also make pages public to keep my notebook open.

Then I discovered something interesting.

The public pages weren’t indexed by Google, the very company that hosts the software. That means that when I used Google to search for notebook pages that I had created, I would get no results.

I attempted to fix this by tweeting my newly created pages. I had read in several places that linking to a non-indexed page from an indexed page would make the first page indexed. And I knew Twitter was indexed in some capacity because you can get search results from there. Unfortunately this did not fix the problem.

So I set out for a new solution. I needed a platform that was search engine optimized (for searching reasons), had organization built in, and could integrate with other cloud technologies.

That brought me to WordPress.

The transition was really easy because I’ve been blogging with Blogger for slightly longer than I’ve been open notebooking. And I knew it had all the features I needed (list time!):

• Blogs self organize reverse chronologically, so the most up-to-date content appears first. You can enhance the organization with tags and in WordPress you can go deeper by using nested categories.
• WordPress allows customization to the extreme. You can install plugins that allow you to integrate Google Docs, photo slideshows, youtube videos (or BenchFly 😉 ), etc. You can add change the appearance of WordPress as well. You can install themes that allow you to control what content users get. Have a photo blog? There’s a theme for that! (I’m using the basic 2011 theme.)
• Navigation is rather easy as well. You can go back through time at the bottom of every page and you can view posts by month, tag, or category. You can do even more if you cleverly use the static page feature. I’ve used it to link specifically important posts through my “Active Experiments” page. This ensures that pages that I want to never lose track of stay available without sifting through months of posts.

For now, WordPress seems like the best available platform and since it is constantly being developed it should remain that way for a while. The fact that there is a cloud hosted version (I’m self-hosting) provides a better chance for survival. Competing content management systems (CMS) like Drupal and Joomla rely on self hosting, which works for some, but not everyone.

One of the biggest issues for or against open notebooks are ease of use. Everyone wants to use a system that requires little maintenance and ensures efficiency. After all, no one wants to have to work on their notebook after working really hard to get data and write results and conclusions.

I think right now WordPress is that system. I’m sure over time that will change, but for now, this is the best and probably the easiest to sell for anyone on the fence about going open notebook.