Nontrivial Exercises

Interesting Wiki Tool - TiddlyWiki

I read about an interesting Wiki tool on the EverNote user forum called TiddlyWiki. I’ve just learned about the Wiki tool concept a few weeks ago, and it’s fascinating.

I “downloaded” the TiddlyWiki tool and have started playing around with it. It’s actually just a single html file that has scripting included to create the wiki linking functionality. Here are a couple of things that I had to figure out to get it to work.

• Go to www.tiddlywiki.com to access the default wiki
• In your browser (I’m using Internet Explorer6 SP2), save the file to your local drive
• Because of some weird behavior of Windows XP SP2, you have to open the saved file in an editor and then re-save it under a different name in order to get Windows and Internet Explorer to treat the file in the “My Computer” zone and be able to save your updates. I simply opened the downloaded html file in Notepad, then saved it with a different name – keeping the “.html” extension. You can read about this on the TiddlyWiki site under the ServicePack2Problems section.
• To create your own sections (called “tiddlers”, unfortunately), you first have to edit an existing section. As far as I can tell, there is no way to create a new blank section. I edited the HelloThere section and added a new keyword called MattIndex.
• I then edited my MattIndex section and added new sections as I wanted to.
• I then customized the name of the wiki and the left side menu items by opening the SpecialTiddlers section. This section contains keywords that define these different elements.

I’m not sure exactly what I will do with this tool, but I at least want to explore the wiki concept a bit. If you have any thoughts about this tool or wiki’s in general, I’d love to hear them.