Fiddly Tiddly

[pasithea]

Well. Rebuilding my stuff after drive crash has taught me that WikityWidget in addition to being no longer supported and somewhat limited in its behavior was also not in my regular backups. So... Goodbye personal wiki. ;-;

But... Hey. Good time to check out other personal wikis. In spite of the insipid name TiddlyWiki looks like it is the winner of the next wiki I'll use. It stores everything in a single HTML file with the help of Java. Without the JAR in the same directory it simply becomes a read-only wiki so I can export just the html file to my phone and have a copy of my personal wiki with me anywhere. (This is handy since I'm planning to condense a bunch of my cookbooks and favorite recipes into just what I use) and of course if I synch is correctly, I can access it from anywhere and it appears that I can just copy the default html to as many htmls as I want and make 'special' wikis which can then be linked via URLs instead of wiki links, allowing me to keep secret projects limited to one machine and so on.

On the downside, it has no security beyond filesystem security and I'm a little concerned about performance of a single giant HTML page but I suspect my use is limited enough it won't be a major issue. Not to mention I always have a web browser running anyhow so the extra memory this might take vs having mysql and a navigator widget always running (as was the case with wikitywidget) probably balances out. Will have to see in a few months.

Comments

[anaisdjuna.livejournal.com]

Dos questiones por favor...

What does one use a personal wiki for?

Does one need to be a programmer to use/make/have one or is there a friendly interface for the clueless user?

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

1:
I'm using it as a central organization point for all the stuff in my head.

For instance, I have a 'ToDo Work' and 'ToDo Personal' entry I just throw stuff under the respective ones and I have quick links in them to get from one to the other because often when I'm making a todo list for work a personal todo pops up or vice versa. If I have stuff that's in my calendar, I can just link to the calendar entry from the ToDo. For larger projects, instead of putting it all in a ToDo list, I'll add an entry to the ToDo that says ProjectX or whatever and it links to the breakdown of that particular project. I also use it to keep track of stuff like recipies, fragments of ideas, book lists, etc.

It's basically an organized pile of post-it notes. You can use it for anything you use a webpage for. The wiki format just makes it easy to get the data displayed nicely so you don't waste a bunch of time coding.

2:
Some wikis require some work to set up correctly but smaller wikis like WikityWidget and TiddlyWiki are just download and use. You can either click a button to create an entry or in a current entry, you can use CamelCaseLettering or [[A Tag Like This]] and when you save the entry, it will Highlight 'CamelCaseLettering' and 'A Tag Like This'. If you mouseover them it says 'no entry about whichever, double-click to create' or something similar.

You double-click on the text and it creates a new entry with that name and you put whatever you want in it.

There's a few formatting strings you can use if you want to make the text prettier. 'text' makes italics. ''text'' makes bold. = Big Header =, == Medium Header ==, === Small header ===, * at the start of a line makes an unordered list. ** is an unordered list indented from the top, # is an enumerated list, etc. But you can do just basic text without any hassle. :)

So like in my wiki, I created a [[ToDo Personal]]
and in it, I made a list like this:

* Create Recipies entry in wiki.
* Make dinner.
** Start rice ''first!''
** Preheat oven.
** etc.
* Pack Kitchen

In the page it looks like this:

• Create Recipies (#Recipies) entry in wiki.
• Make dinner.
• Start rice first!
• Preheat oven.
• etc
• Pack Kitchen (#Kitchen)

The corresponding HTML if I typed it by hand is sort of like this:

Create Recipies (#Recipies) entry in wiki.
Make dinner.
Start rice first!
Preheat oven.
etc
Pack Kitchen (#Kitchen)

Also, it created links to Recipes and Kitchen which I could create by double-clicking on them. Recipes is a category page. Anything I tag as recipies will show up there. (Optionally I could just use the wiki search to find my recipes too I'm just an organizational fiend)

And 'Kitchen' links to todo list of stuff to pack in the kitchen that I want to take over to the new house now rather than when we do the bulk of our moving.

So. That's what I use it for. :) I've seen a lot of people also use them for things like developing characters to go in a story and hold ideas for other stories while they're writing and stuff like that. It's really just an easy way to organize a bunch of little notes.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Interesting... the HTML PRE tags don't get interpreted correctly by LJ.

Anyhow. Suffice to say, the HTML version is a lot more typing and a lot more line-noise-looking than the wiki text version. It took me about 5 times as long to type as the wiki text version and I know HTML from memory and don't need to look anything up.

[anaisdjuna.livejournal.com]

Wow! Sounds pretty neat and pretty helpful & creativity empowering.

Thank you for such a careful and informative response :-) !!!

[zeeth_kyrah]

So, mostly the kind of stuff I'm using a mindmap for.

I'm finding that a wiki is good for organizing diverse information in a publically accessible way (very organized, every topic separated by page and header, layout as in a document), but a mindmap is good for organizing stuff being used privately (very visual, layout as lists and trees, topics separated by branch or folder). This is mostly because HTML is not designed for visual layout that goes sideways or interstitial instead of vertical, even if you're using tables and CSS.