Tools for Maintaining a Personal Research Journal

To keep a journal of research activities, especially when studying for a PhD, is generally considered a good idea (see for example desJardins' guide How to Succeed in Graduate School). Such a journal helps to organize ideas, to record the progress of research, and to leverage building new ideas. On the web, you can find also other guidelines which give more examples what to include in the journal, e.g., Notes on the Personal Research Notebook / Journal.

While I used such a journal concept intuitively during my diploma thesis, I wrote it on separate sheets of papers which I transformed later into the written thesis. This worked out very well at that time and on that project. However, now I want to use a tool which can automate those time-consuming things like searching and copy&paste. Today, I have several subprojects and small parts which are sometimes (at least at the beginning) very unrelated. Using a paper notebook as a journal would not be very efficient. So, I wondered which software tools would work out as a research journal for a PhD.
I have tried out several tools, starting from simple text files to journal and todo list functions in KDE Kontact. But the information is still scattered throughout several files on my disk in several different formats (text files, LaTeX files, OpenOffice files, pictures, etc.). I need something that can combine everything and provides a fast search and kind of sorting function (like tagging in Web 2.0 applications).

Finally, I have found two applications which are suiteable for this task: Journler for Mac OS X. This is exactly what I needed. You can enter journal entries in chronological order, add tags, pictures, URLs, PDFs, whatever. When you click on a tag, Journler automatically shows up a list of all entries with this tag. And of course, it makes use of the fast search engines of Leopard to quickly scan your entries for keywords. This is great!

Unfortunately, I have to work on a PC laptop at work. So I can't use Journler there. But I have something similar: BasKet Note Pads for KDE on Linux. It has similar functionalities, and I have started to use it. One good feature I noticed: you can import notes from KNotes and simple text files (now it pays back to have used text files!*g*).

RapidWeaver and RapidBlog

I have begun to use RapidWeaver as web development tool. Although it is only available for Mac, I did not find any similar tool for Linux or even Windows. RapidWeaver works and looks like iWeb, the Apple web-site tool in the iLife package. It is very easy to create a web site with navigation bar, blog, picture gallery, etc. It supports themes, which are actually stylesheet packages including background images and the like.

RapidWeaver also supports Add-on. There is one interesting add-on I have found: RapidBlog. This add-on extends the blogging module of RapidWeaver with synchronization of a Google Blogger (Blogspot) account. This is very nice since it allows you to write your blog posts online on any web browser and system, using the Blogger web interface. But you can still write and manage your posts in the RapidWeaver application.

Now, there is one interesting question: Does RapidBlog automatically synchronize the Blog when you write a new post on the Google Blogger web interface or do you need to run the sync within RapidWeaver manually?

Update: Yeah, this works automatically! Thanks to the PHP script, this site automatically includes the latest posts from the original Blogspot site.