If you haven’t heard of it, Tiddlywiki is a single file, off-line, single user “wiki” that you can use to store notes and information in an easy-to-retrieve format. I found it and decided I loved it…for about 6 hours. Now I’m looking at the source code and trying to understand it so I can rip out all the stuff I don’t like and replace it.

Tiddlywiki doesn’t allow any sort of XHTML and requires all code to be done in textile. This is great once in a while or for places where XHTML would be a bad idea, but for people like me who have been writing HTML since the <blink> tag was the “in” thing, this is just irritating and I was finding that I was having to go back over my “tiddles” frequently to coax the content into displaying what I want. I find it much easier to just write <code> some code </code> than trying to remember that I’m supposed to type {{{ some code }}} — it also makes more sense. Now I get that using straight XHTML could conceivably cause errors if broken tags were used in a message, but there are ways around this: simply replace the < and > in tags with some other character before saving or create a function to balance tags.

It also doesn’t have a powerful whitespace parser like WordPress does. The Tiddlywiki one is fairly basic and just seems to replace new lines with <br> (note I said <br> not <br />), and it isn’t too difficult: I converted the WordPress parser to Javascript for the Live preview features in INAP rather quickly.

Anyway, I was planning to use it for a download-able readme file, but before I can do that I’m going to have to make a few modifications.