TiddlyWiki

Ouch.

This is a bit of a hack. In an ideal world, clicking the save button should just give you a file save dialogue box and let you choose where to save your spanking new personal TiddlyWiki. Unfortunately doing stuff in web browsers is never that easy, and there's a couple of hoops to be jumped through. See below for a quick guide.

The steps to save your changes as a new, standalone TiddlyWiki are simple, but can be error prone.

1. Make sure that all the text is selected in the edit box above. Copy it to the clipboard.
2. Go back to the browser window showing your editted TiddlyWiki and save the HTML as a new file.
3. Open the HTML file in a text editor like Notepad. Scroll to the bottom and locate the marker lines picked out with a row of asterisks.
4. Select the text from just above that marker back up to the previous marker.
5. Paste the new text in.
6. Save the HTML file.
Suggestions or improvements welcome.

A WikiWord is a word composed of a bunch of other words slammed together with each of their first letters capitalised. WikiWord notation in a WikiWikiWeb is used to name individual pages. Furthermore, referring to a page automatically creates a link to it. Clicking on a link jumps to that page or, if it doesn't exist, to an editor to create it. TiddlyWiki uses WikiWord titles for smaller chunks of MicroContent.

My email address is jeremy (at) osmosoft (dot) com

TiddlyWiki

a reusable non-linear personal web notebook

Hopefully, reading a TiddlyWiki is fairly self explanatory. Within the main story column, click on bold links to read a linked tiddler. Click on italic links to create a new tiddler. When you hover the mouse over a tiddler it's highlighted and some extra options appear by the title: 'close' just closes the tiddler in question, 'link' does the opposite by closing all other tiddlers. Finally, 'edit' allows you to edit the text of any tiddler; changes are not reflected back to the server, though. See SavingStuff for more details.

One of the neatest features of TiddlyWiki is that it is entirely self-contained in a single HTML file. It contains the actual hypertext document, and the JavaScript, CascadingStyleSheets and HTML necessary to both view and edit the document. This means that it is trivial to host a TiddlyWiki on a website, or to distribute one by email. And anyone with a reasonably recent web browser will be able to read and edit it.

TiddlyWiki uses several special tiddlers to hold the text used for the MainMenu, the SiteTitle and the SiteSubtitle. Go ahead and edit them and see the results.

A TiddlyWiki is like a blog because it's divided up into neat little chunks, but it encourages you to read it by hyperlinking rather than sequentially: if you like, a non-linear blog analogue that binds the individual microcontent items into a cohesive whole. I think that TiddlyWiki represents a novel medium for writing, and will promote it's own distinctive WritingStyle. This is the first version of TiddlyWiki and so, as discussed in TiddlyWikiDev, it's bound to be FullOfBugs, have many MissingFeatures and fail to meet all of the DesignGoals. And of course there's NoWarranty, and it might be judged a StupidName.

I'm Jeremy Ruston, a technologist based in London. I do consultancy work through my company Osmosoft at http://www.osmosoft.com, as well as pursuing some independent projects like TiddlyWiki. If you've got any comments or suggestions on this site, do please EmailMe.

This is the FirstVersion of TiddlyWiki. It has been superseded by the ThirdVersion at http://www.tiddlywiki.com

The FirstVersion of TiddlyWiki is distinguished by what it lacks: saving, searching and formatting, all of which are included in the ThirdVersion.

This FirstVersion of TiddlyWiki doesn't handle saving at all elegantly. Click the 'Save all' link at the top right for more details.