Portable Fiasco

I'm sort of a sucker for office supplies. I like, but do not often use, miniature notebooks, fancy gel pens, Post-It notes, organizer binders, and so on. Maybe it's the feel and smell of new paper that triggers an impossible dream of efficient organization and clear thinking in my mind. However many notepads I accumulate, I use them infrequently and ineffectively. I take notes in meetings, but the notes are seldom worth looking at again.

photo (cc) churl

So it was with a mix of interest and pessimism that I stumbled on TiddlyWiki the other day. (It's been around for four years, and I can't believe I hadn't heard of it until now.) TiddlyWiki is described as “a reusable non-linear personal web notebook,” which is not a bad definition. More technically, it's a wiki system embodied in a single HTML file. You use it by downloading it and opening it in a web browser. There's no special setup or install to do. Unlike so many web apps, it includes explicit support for Opera, which requires one additional file. But it's just as easy.

Once you've got TiddlyWiki running, you can type in whatever you'd like. You can use a markup system to format your text in all sorts of fancy ways. You can include pictures, photos, and other media if you're so inclined.

While that's all neat, it's not important. Linking is what makes TiddlyWiki special.

Any text you enter will be part of a sort of mini-article called a “tiddler.” Each article includes a title, a list of tags, and a body of text or media. You can very simply create links from the body of one tiddler to another by tiddler title. Tags are tiddlers, too; click on a tag, and a tiddler will be created that includes a list of links to other tiddlers with that tag. And of course, you can create links to the web as well.

It is this free-form nature of cross-linked tiddlers that makes TiddlyWiki so different from a word processor. If Notepad is the digital equivalent of a magical, infinitely eraseable paper notepad, then TiddlyWiki is the digital equivalent of a pack of magical, self-indexing index cards. For me, that's where TiddlyWiki picks up the office-supply siren song, daring me to imagine myself as an organized super-achiever. TiddlyWiki sounds like it should be perfect for all sorts of projects. In reality, I fear the plethora of settings and formatting options to tinker with will distract me from real work. That wouldn't be a problem for everyone, of course, but I know it can be a problem for me.

But you don't know until you try, so I am trying to use TiddlyWiki to document issues, questions, and problems with my current project at work. I'm hoping that for once, my notes will be worth looking back at, and that decisions made will be decisions documented. I've got my wiki on a flash drive, so I can edit it any time, where ever I am.