TiddlyWiki For The World!
Tagged as: Apr 15You might have heard of a wiki. Then again, you also might not have heard one it. It’s a method of displaying user-modifiable content. That is, it can be changed by the people looking at it. This is different than things like this blog where I and I alone get to write. The wiki has been gaining notoriety since it allows the collaboration of knowledge, especially over the Internet.
The name wiki gets its name from Ward Cunningham, developer of the very first wiki. It’s actually Hawaiian in origin (wiki means fast), but you can read more about that at Wikipedia’s (appropriate since it’s one of the most well known wikis) page on the wiki.
The TiddlyWiki
So now that we’ve got the foundation knowledge in place, I wanted to share about the TiddlyWiki. (It still strikes me as an amusing name.) It is touted as a personal non-linear personal web notebook. I like to think of it as a central place where you can store whatever you want. It’s pretty easy to use after some initial adjustment. It is a single html file just like any old webpage.
To use it just open it up in any web browser, and you’re ready to go. Double-click on things to change them, and you can start creating new tiddlers (entries) and deleting ones that you don’t need. Saving your changes saves the information into that exact same html file. So all of the data and the framework are contained within a single file. As long as you have a web browser, you can modify your file. And what computer out there doesn’t have some sort of a web browser nowadays?
This file is the perfect size for a portable usb drive. It starts off empty at about 250KB, but it doesn’t grow all that quickly since only the new text that is added is stored.
The TiddlyWiki is a method that is open to different uses. And there are many.
Some uses for TiddlyWiki
- Web Journal – save links and articles that you find online
- Blog – extremely easy to write and publish (just put the html file on a web server and it’s published)
- Personal Journal – just have the file with you wherever you are, and it’ll be safe from prying eyes
- Collaborate on projects – one person can write and the changes will be instantly available for anyone else to see
There are many ways to store information. You could write it on paper, you could just remember everything, you could use a Microsoft Word document, whatever. So here are some reasons why you’d use a TiddlyWiki instead of one of those other methods.
Advantages of TiddlyWiki
- Basic tags (which allow you to quickly see all entries with a particular tag)
- Quick searching as you type into the search box
- Self-contained (it’s a single file)
- Portable (I guess that’s always relative, but it’s small in size)
- Interactive feel
Server-side Implementations
Personally I’ve been using a version of this that’s on my server. I tried a couple of different products, but MiniTiddlyServer was the easiest and most straightforward for my PHP-enabled server. All I needed to do was download the zip file, put it onto my server, and off I went! Update: Check out my own TiddlyWiki
For those without their own server, TiddlySpot seems like a reasonable free solution.
I looked at yours, but it seems to me that this would be one more thing that I’d start and not use. Thanks for sharing the info on it, though. Guess I need to click on the links you put up (but I don’t need any links to articles about dating!).
Well one thing that I’ve noticed that you might like is something that I started to do recently. For me, I use recipes from all over the place, and I started to put them into this tiddlywiki. That way, eventually I’ll have a single file that will have all of the recipes that I like/want/use. You could use it for your bacon recipes!
But really, this could be really useful if you have a laptop. That way, you can just keep this file on your laptop that can be accessed with or without an Internet connection.
Great Article. I have added it to my own TiddlyWiki. I especially liked the section describing TiddlyWiki’s advantages over other solutions like using a Word document etc.