Having Fun Slogging my TiddlyWiki

Just wanted to take a minute to talk about a couple of tools that I find indispensable: TiddlyWiki and Slogger.

I'm a big fan of wikis in general. We use TWiki at my office. Like most Wikis, its a server based solution that lends itself well to collaborative contributions by multiple users.

Awhile back I thought it might be nice to have my own Wiki, for storing random bits of information that I know I will need in the future. I considered various alternatives. I could run a Wiki server through my web hosting account, and it would be accessible from pretty much anywhere. The downside to that is that I'd be worried about somebody being able to snoop the contents. Another possibility would be to set up a Wiki server on one of my boxes on my home network. It would still be accessible to me pretty much anywhere I have Internet access, thanks to OpenVPN. But as ocassionally happens, inertia kept me from going to the trouble of setting that up.

Then one day, I stumbled across TiddlyWiki. In addition to being a fun word to say, this is a clever little app that provides a lot of Wiki goodness, while consisting of merely HTML and Javascript. That's right -- no application to install! No server to connect to, thus no network connection required! You just add your topics, make your edits, and save the page. It's all contained in a single file. I keep the master copy on my laptop and only do edits on it, but have a script that I kick off periodically that will rsync the latest revisions to all my machines.

I use it to keep track of all kinds of info: todo lists, bookmarks, work-related tidbits of info, short "how-tos" on all kinds of topics (since my memory sucks -- curse old age!), all sorts of random bits of information.

I also use a Firefox extension called Slogger to further enhance my personal wiki. Slogger lets you save the contents of every web page you visit, if you want. Instead, I have a button on my Firefox toolbar that, with a single click, saves a copy of the current page (including graphics, etc) to a directory underneath the one I have my TiddlyWiki file in. Then I can create an external link which points to the contents. Really handy if you find a web page with some useful info that you think you might need to refer to in the future - and you don't have to worry about that page disappearing.

This solution works great for me, and I use it far more than I originally anticipated I would. At this point, it would be a catastrophe to somehow lose the contents. Thus, I make frequent backups. :)

The only complaint I have is that the text formatting rules are a little different from the ones TWiki uses, so I occasionally find myself getting tripped up by the subtle differences. I don't know who the oddball is here, or if there even is a set standard for text formatting - TWiki and TiddlyWiki are the only Wikis I've used for any real length of time.

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