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Wiki on a stick

by Bren on May 16th, 2005

So, probably everyone has already seen the GTD version of TiddlyWiki, eh? If not, it’s good stuff and you might dig it. First, you’ve got to already understand wikis which, by now, ought to be a given. But if not, a wiki is a webpage that you can edit using your browser and a few special "tags" (aka markup).

TiddlyWiki has been around a few months and caused a bit of a stir when it first showed up. The reason that it’s so neat is that rather than being hosted on a server, like regular webpages and other wikis, TiddlyWiki just lives on your local computer (or portable drive, CD, floppy, whatever). It’s just one file, which you can email to other people, or to yourself. You can put the file on a thumbdrive and get a wiki-on-a-stick, which will be available to you anytime you’ve got a computer with a USB port. You won’t need internet access to use the wiki, unless you’ve got links embedded in the pages.

The GTDTiddlyWiki is an adaptation of the original and has been pre-built with some GTD-specific pages. The styling is updated a bit and there’s some funky animation which you’ll probably want to turn off unless you like looking at the pretty colors and special effects moving across your screen. I like the effect, but I don’t like waiting for the animation to finish. What’s really nice is that you can keep all your lists in the wiki and have them cross-referenced and the search function is slick enough that you should have no trouble finding things again. More context over on Merlin’s post, and the 43folders Google Group.

Personal wikis, like TiddlyWiki and GTDTidddlyWiki, are great solutions to keeping notes, links, etc all in one place. I’m still using EverNote quite a bit, and at first I wondered (again) whether something like TiddlyWiki would be a good replacement. Right now I don’t think so. There are definite drawbacks and benefits to both but, for me, EverNote does what I need it to do just a little bit better than a personal wiki. And I’m talking about any wiki here, not just the TiddlyWiki versions. Don’t get me wrong, I still love me some wiki–use them daily at the office and on projects. I won’t belabor all the pros and cons of each, but here’s the main bits between TiddlyWiki and EverNote that keep me coming back to EverNote: EverNote gives me a right-click menu option to add stuff from the web into EverNote, regardless of whether EverNote is actually running. I use that all the time. I just compile tons of stuff in EverNote and then sort through it all later–it’s really great. The big drawback for me, which keeps me evaluating stuff like TiddlyWiki, is that EverNote must reside on a harddrive–there’s no EverNote-on-a-stick (’course, EverNote is Windows-only, so no love for the Mac people, though you’ve got stuff like Devonthink, which I covet). There’s more to EverNote that I love, but I do wish it were more portable. I can email the database back and forth to myself, but that’s a little funky–gotta find the right directory, etc…

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