Glop

Tiddlywiki is a great tool I came across recently while looking for something to manage my data. I’d previously used hnb but found it slightly restrictive. I couldn’t easily check it when away from my machine. Checking it requires ssh’ing into my pc in college, which requires a sshkey that I don’t always carry around with me and also making sure I had Internet access !

I don’t recall exactly how I ended up encountering the TiddlyWiki tool, I think I was reading through a Nokia 770 email list and saw it mentioned. I was really impressed when I saw what it could do.

Tiddlywiki is a wiki, just like MediaWiki, TWiki etc. The difference with TiddlyWiki is that it is completely client side software. The wiki consists of a single file with a good deal of javascript in it. When a new entry is added to the wiki, that file itself is edited by the Javascipt and the new entry stored in a div. This means you only need to use your browser to manage and store your information, todo, notes, ideas, documentation etc.

There are several tutorials linked from the tiddlywiki website which explain how to get going. It does take a bit of getting used to before one starts getting things done, but the learning curve is well worth it. Data is entered into constructs called Tiddlers. By typing in a wiki formatted word like AnExampleOfAWikiWord, this word becomes a link to a new Tiddler called AnExampleOfAWikiWord. Clicking on the link bring up the tiddler, you edit it and save your data, nice and simple.

Another great thing about TiddlyWiki is how extensible it is. Numerous plugins have been written for it, from simple things like adding timestamps by inserting a {ts} to comprehensive calendering and ToDo systems. A neat thing about the plugins is how easy it is to install them. A plugin distributed with the default wiki file is an import plugin. If you see a tiddlywiki you like, point the import plugin at the url of the wiki page and it will list every Tiddler on the page. You can pick which ones you want to import and it will save them into the local file. A decent plugin website is http://www.tiddlytools.com. The trick is to keep your Tiddlywiki as simple as possible. There are an awful lot of plugins out there that are just useless and slow the system down.

Along the same lines, there are also plenty of nice themes for TiddlyWiki. Check out http://tiddlythemes.com/ for a very nice site with some decent themes.

Of course, there are serverside implementations of TiddlyWiki so as to write data back to a server, at the moment I carry mine around on a usb key and store it in a version control repository. I’ll probably move it onto a web server soon enough.