Tinderbox is personal content management system for making, analyzing, and sharing notes.

When it's time to share your notes, the best way to share is often the Web.

1. How Tinderbox builds a Web page

2. Assembling many notes into a page

When it's time to share your notes on the Web, Tinderbox works hard to build Web pages the way you want. You can modify every aspect of your Web site -- the layout, the design, the selection of what will be published and what will be kept private. Everything is up to you -- but Tinderbox does its best to make sensible assumptions if you don't provide specific instructions.

When Tinderbox builds a Web page, it always uses three pieces of information:

1. the note that is being shared.
2. an export template -- an HTML (or XML) file that tells Tinderbox how to export the note. The template describes what parts of the note to share, and how they should appear on the Web page.
3. an HTML folder, where Tinderbox will store the Web page it builds.

The note contains the information, the template describes how the information will look, and the HTML folder describes where the shared information will be saved.

A SIMPLE EXAMPLE

Let's consider a very simple case, and follow how Tinderbox exports a single note. Here we see the note as it appears in Tinderbox, in a Map View and in a Text window.

Tinderbox provides many different placeholders. They're all described in the User Manual and Export Reference Card (where they are called HTML Export Codes)

The export template is simply an HTML file that shows how we want Tinderbox to export the note. The template describes the appearance of the note and tells Tinderbox where your information should go.

Of course, the template can't know in advance what the note will contain -- and the same template may be used for many different notes.

Instead, we put placeholders in the template that tell Tinderbox where information should go. Here, "^title" represents where the note's title appears, and "^text" represents where the note's body text appears.

When you export to HTML (or use the HTML View Window), Tinderbox opens the note's export template. Whenever Tinderbox finds a placeholder, it replaces it with data from the notes. When everything is done, Tinderbox saves its result in a file inside the document's HTML folder, where it's ready for you to check, revise as needed, and upload to your Web site.