TiddlyWiki For The World!

Apr 15

You 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 (Update: MiniTiddlyServer is not deprecated so you will need to figure out another way) 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. *[html]: Hyper Text Markup Language *[usb]: Universal Serial Bus