I thought some of you might be interested in how I'm using WordPress to help me with my "spring cleaning".  

Okay, so it's not exactly Spring, but I've been putting off this project for years, not just months and I can't let a little hot weather get in my way now.  

The Problem - 

I have all these files on my computer: photos, journals, bits and pieces of stories and story ideas, school papers, scans of payroll stubs and tax returns, and who knows what else.  I save everything.  Using the computer to save them has made it possible to sill have people in my house - but it's still a jumbled mess and I can't find anything on the rare occasions I dare to look.  (Plus, the mess doubles in size every time I do a backup!)

The Solution - 

I love WordPress.  I've been using it for quite a while for websites, and eventually installed a web server on my own computer so I could have a place to experiment with things before putting them out "live" on the Internet.  But recently I discovered that WordPress is the world's greatest filling system.  You can put anything in a post.  And you can put any date on the post you need to (I've got things dated back to the 1900's from our genealogy stuff).  And you can put tags on stuff too. Between the categories and tags you can FIND things again in seconds instead of days or months.

Installing your own web server isn't really harder than installing Word, or the latest video game.  Someone even wrote a (free) eBook on how to do it with WAMP (open-source and free software).  Once WAMP is installed, setting up WordPress is a matter of downloading a .zip file and unzipping it.  (There are a couple more steps - but if any one is interested I can post a more detailed how-to on my blog with screen shots and stuff to help.)

Once you have your own copy of WordPress installed on your computer you can copy and paste all those photos and little bits of writing into posts on your personal/private blog and then use the categories, tags, and post dates to make them easy to find whenever you need them again.  

Besides sorting out those old files, I'm planning to start keeping my "writer's notebook" on WordPress as well.  That way I can do more than just notice a cool line for dialog, or remember a great setting when I see it.  I'll be able to find them again when I want to use them in a new story.