TiddlyWiki
If you’re the type to carry around a notebook and jot everything down, you’ll like TiddlyWiki, http://www.tiddlywiki.com/. Wikis are editable online documents–you make the edits right online and the changes appear right away, no tedious uploading. TiddlyWiki is a wiki on a selfcontained HTML file. All you need is a single file and a web browser. It doesn’t have to be online, either. You can use it right from your desktop or USB drive. Which also means that your notes aren’t live on the web for everyone to see.
The website is a little confusing, since it’s actually a TiddlyWiki itself. Find the DownloadSoftware tiddler for a blank TiddlyWiki file. The “empty” file does include a couple of entries of instructions. Just click on the links to change your title, subtitle, and basic settings. Then start making notes or “tiddlers”. The only rule is that your note titles must be have no spaces, for instance OnlineReserves instead of Online Reserves.
By assigning tags to each note, you can organize your notes into categories. For instance, I’m using a TiddlyWiki to, among other things, save text instructions for some of the basic library functions, like creating a library password and using online reserves. So one tag that I use is “instructions”. I have mine on a USB drive, so that I can edit it on any computer, but I back it up to my faculty web site, so that I can access the information from any computer. I can’t edit the web site, without saving the file back to the server, but I can view it whenever I need to. If you’re curious, the URL is http://home.southernct.edu/~hedreenr1/Tiddly.html (with a capital T).
If you don’t like the basic look, you can modify the CSS styling with by creating a tiddler called StyleSheet with a list of CSS formatting commands (background color, fonts, etc.) You’ll need to know basic CSS syntax. More information, with examples, is available on the TiddlyWiki site under CustomStyleSheet. You can also change the default tiddler to display when you first load the wiki, and the left side navigation bar.
Everytime I go to the site there is something new. Jeremy Rushton, a consulting technologist in the UK, is the creator behind TiddlyWiki and he is constantly fiddling and improving the site and the program.
Update (4/11/06): After using TiddlyWiki from my USB drive for a bit, I’ve noticed one awkward thing. When you save your file, TiddlyWiki saves a time/date stamped backup. After a while these get pretty numerous, so you should probably make a point of cleaning the old ones out every so often.
