Thursday, December 18, 2008

Gliffy diagrams backup tool

Delicious  is a useful tool. I use it in an unconventional way sometimes: I bookmark some resources with tags which serve as indicators for my backup tools. As an example, when I tag my Gliffy diagram pages with the my-diagrams tag, my backup tool grabs the corresponding diagrams and makes local copies on my server.

The backup tool I am referring to is readily available here.  I configure the backup tool to run periodically through cron jobs on my Linux server.

Monday, December 8, 2008

MindMeister map export

I use MindMeister almost daily. I wanted an easy way to backup my numerous mindmaps so I crafted a Python command-line tool for this purpose. It is available through this link and works under both Windows and Linux environments.  The tool performs logging in Windows registry or Linux /var/log/mm.log . For easier usage, the installer copies the command-line file to the  designated python script directory.


In summary, to use the tool (assuming one as a working Python installation,  3.0 <>=2.5 ):
Step 1) Register for an API key with MindMeister
Step 2) Install the tool through the command line:  easy_install jld
Step 3) Perform authorization: mm -s SECRET -k API_KEY auth
This step will open-up a browser window
Step 4) For regular backup, use a scheduler (such as Linux cron).

Suggestions are welcome!