People who are close to me know that I have a bit of a thing for Productivity
Software of all shapes and sizes. I’m usually a categorical thinker; I rely on
notes (either my own or those others put up online) to acquire specialized
knowledge in a variety of subjects, which I then bring to the table at work
and at home. Therefore, I’ve had an on-again-off-again affair with various
note-taking apps. I certainly haven’t tried them all, but I’ve tried a few,
and had trouble sticking with them. And I’m here today to talk about my
latest experiment, which is
TiddlyWiki.
TiddlyWiki is a 16-year-old personal-Wiki software, designed for sort of
being a second brain for individual people. It’s a small self-contained
program which runs inside a single HTML/CSS/JavaScript page in the browser,
and can run anywhere browsers can run.
It can run on the internet or off; on your hard drive; on a portable USB drive;
on any operating system that can run a web browser.
When I say TiddlyWiki is self-contained,
I mean that any valid TiddlyWiki file contains:
- the full source code for TiddlyWiki itself
- the full user interface for TiddlyWiki
- all plugins and themes that have been installed into that particular TiddlyWiki system
- all the little notes and documents that have been stored in that TiddlyWiki file
- all images, music, videos, fonts, or literally anything else, which have been stored
That portability makes TiddlyWiki quite appealing to me.
When I started my career working at a bank,
pretty much the only things that were IT-friendly were web pages.
(And even that was with the caveats that the web pages had to be be allowed
by the firewall, safe-for-work, couldn’t give away company data, etc.)
The fact that TiddlyWiki is a customizable, plug-and-play note taking system that can run anywhere and fits into a single file, means that I can use it anywhere, at work or at home.
I also really like the power of a medium which is equal parts document and
self-contained application. There are some really cool TiddlyWikis out there,
which take advantage of the interactivity of TiddlyWiki.
I’ve only discovered a few examples so far, but some include:
I’m putting up a sample/starter TiddlyWiki with some of my preferred defaults here for reference
– it’s been pre-populated with some of the plugins/themes
that I’ve found and like.
I may or may not keep it “up-to-date”, but I thought I’d at least keep a copy
laying around for others to take a gander.
I also hope in the future to write a little bit more about TiddlyWiki,
such as what I like about its architecture and and implementation (for nerds only).