Free(Your)Mind

At The Ministry I've had the joyous task of creating a site audit of the whole intranet. I was toying with the idea of using OpenOffice.org Calc, though I wasn’t relishing the prospect. And then somebody suggested FreeMind mind mapping software that is ideal for creating site maps.

It’s very easy to use, and the keyboard shortcuts for moving around and creating child and sibling nodes makes it a brisk breeze to map a site. The bonus is that a development version is available for PortableApps, which I need because of the Security Lockdown at The Ministry.

There’s also been very few problems with the development version. The only problem I had was exporting to PDF with all the nodes expanded (500+ of ’em), and I found it easier to print to PDF. Otherwise, exporting is pretty darned straight-forward, and there’s a lovely feature whereby you can export to a javascript HTML version, with expandable nodes. Great for sharing with luddite colleagues who don’t share my enthusiasm for Free Software and PortableApps ;)