Tiddlywiki is both good and bad.
Posted on Thursday the 9th of August, 2007 at 11:24 pm in Asides, SoftwareIf 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.
Hey there,
interesting read.
Reply to FNDThe <code></code> issue can be solved by using <html></html> tags (cf. TiddlyWiki.com).
As for the whitespaces issues, that’s being worked on (for v2.3 or v3.0, I believe).
By the way: There’s also a huge number of plugins; that’s always worth looking into.
Ah thank you for that.
Reply to AaronSo what wiki do you like now? Is your wiki only for your personal usage (running on your local computer) or on the internet? Did you try Mediawiki or Dokuwiki?
Reply to Sridhar KatakamThe wikis I had were all local.
I tried Mediawiki a long time ago, but it is far more than I needed and quite a bit too complex for what I was looking for. I never tried Dokuwiki because it was also too complex for what I needed.
I ended up trying a few computer based note taking apps, but never really found anything I liked, so I kinda ended up giving up on the idea for now at least.
Reply to AaronFor personal note taking, try EverNote. Once you get used to, you’ll love it.
Reply to Sridhar Katakamhttp://twhelp.tiddlyspot.com is loaded with information about how TiddlyWiki works with lots of working examples.
Reply to Morris Gray