TiddlyWiki - a portable wiki
TiddlyWiki is a single html file that works as a wiki. You can put it on a
thumbdrives, save it to your harddrive, save it to a drive on the network somewhere, or put it on a web server. TiddlyWiki makes a great guerrilla wiki; a wiki you can use when you don’t have support/permission for a real wiki like mediawiki (the wiki that runs wikipedia).
At first, I didn’t see much usefulness for tiddlywiki. That happens to me sometimes. I’ll see something and not see much potential, but after thinking about it and having an epiphany, or using it for a while, it suddenly dawns on me that it’s great. The same thing happened to me with LifeHacker.com. I didn’t think it was that great at first, because it seemed so un-organized (It’s a blog) but then I learned that if you just visit it every day, you’ll see some really cool things. And if you know what you’re looking for, you can find some good stuff with the search function.
In all their divine wisdom, the higher-ups at work decided not to approve of a wiki for my department. They also took away our access to an electronic form of our documentation after someone made changes to a file. Apparently, they didn’t want to just write-protect the files. So I made a little wiki with TiddlyWiki and put it up on a shared network drive. Then I gave out the location to some trusted colleagues.
Only one other person has contributed so far, but the wiki is useful for me as I use it as a notebook to keep important information. I try to update it about once a day as new things pop up at work. Someday, it will probably catch on and become a valuable resource for more than just me, but for now, I’m still happy with it. The hyperlinking, and built in search capability could be duplicated by making a Word or Open Office document, but the way tiddly wiki presents articles without showing everything else in the document as well, really cuts down on the clutter. TiddlyWiki also allows you to tag articles, so that you can group them logically.
I’ve also used tiddlywiki to create the help file I use with autohotkey software I’ve written and distributed at work.
TiddlyWiki is a small file. It works really well for organizing lots of small articles or chunks of data like how-to instructions, recipes, and the like. TiddlyWiki is popular with students for note-taking purposes. When I was in school, laptops were too expensive for students to tote them around to class, but that seems to be more common now.
TiddlyWiki works best with Firefox, but Internet explorer works as well. Internet Explorer only seems to be able to save changes if the tiddlywiki is on a local drive though. And if you put tiddlywiki up on a webserver, you will need to install an extention to be able to save the file.
I recommend saving a blank tiddlywiki to your computer or thumbdrive so you’ll have it handy if you ever decide you’d like to use it. Once you have it, and you’ve played around with it, you might just find a great use for it like I did. Give it some time, and I think you’ll begin to see what all the excitement surrounding tiddlywiki is all about.