Started Using TiddlyWiki

07 May 2006

A year or so back I experimented with TiddlyWiki but didn’t really get beyond that.

I’ve since taken it up again as an attempt to become better organized. We use Confluence at work and I’ve experiemented with having a personal space where I can record my ToDo’s and other misc. pieces of information. It’s nice but requires me to be either on the network or at least vpn’d in. Basically, I want an information store that will _always_ be available, with or without an Internet connection.

Not ideal in all circumstances.

Enter TiddlyWiki

A free MicroContent WikiWikiWeb created by JeremyRuston and a busy Community of independent developers. It’s written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to run on any modern browser without needing any ServerSide logic. It allows anyone to create personal SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to a WebServer, sent by email or kept on a USB thumb drive to make a WikiOnAStick. It also makes a great GuerillaWiki. This is revision 2.0.10 of TiddlyWiki, and is published under an OpenSourceLicense.

Prior to today, my strategy of organization has consisted of Jira (our bug tracker) tasks, Firefox bookmarks, Confluence entries, del.icio.us tags along with various email reminders.

My medium-term goal is to rid myself of most firefox bookmarks (the to-read ones), del.icio.us tags, and email reminders. My del.icio.us feed has become populated with hundreds upon hundreds of links and I’m finding it difficult to track things down.

TiddlyWiki looks like it could be a solution to the problem, I think the only barrier is me finding time to actually make use of it. It’s also nice that it doesn’t involve any server-side logic and thus I can copy and backup easily.

In closing, I must say that even if I don’t continue using TiddlyWiki, it’s at least an interesting application of recent (and not-so-recent) web technologies.