A very clever wiki

Here’s one of those ideas that has you slapping your head and exclaiming “why didn’t I think of that?”

TiddlyWiki is a “reusable non-linear personal web notebook”, which is a rather long-winded way of saying it’s a standalone wiki. That’s right - you read that correctly. It’s a wiki-in-a-file - there’s no server software, no need to be online, no software to install. One file is all you need, and it gives you more-or-less everything you’d expect in a wiki. You simply open it in your browser and edit away.

Why this is such an incredibly cool idea (forgive the superlatives, but I think this is genius) is that once you’ve created your TiddlyWiki file, you can then email it as a file attachment to anyone - and so long as they’ve got a browser they will be able to see and use the wiki in exactly the same way as you did. They don’t need to be able to access your server as they would with an online wiki, or have the same software as you as if you were using something like Groove. Effectively, it’s a blend of collaboration by wiki and file attachments - removing the synchronicity from a wiki, if you like.

At the moment, it’s very experimental, and actually saving content is rather awkward (in fact, the instructions page is titled ‘Ouch’). But software problems like that seldom stay problems for long once they’re known, so this is something that we’re going to see more of.

Filed under Wikis |