Friday, September 02, 2005

The small Wiki that could

First of all, click here to visit TiddlyWiki homepage and play around a little bit. Then return here.

OK, did you get all that? Great stuff, isn't it?

I needed some sort of small Wiki (for my personal project), which could be run on my local computer, preferably even without Apache (i.e. with its own embedded server). TiddlyWiki is exactly that and more - it does not need any server. In fact, it does not need any server-side logic at all!

Everything you saw at tiddlywiki.com was the contents of SINGLE HTML DOCUMENT. Yes, everything gets loaded as a single page and JavaScript is then used to manipulate and edit the "Tiddlers" (information snippets). After the page loads, there is absolutely no traffic between your browser and the server where the page resides.

Can this even be called "Wiki"? How do you save changes? Basically, you just use "Save as" option in your browser (although that poses some problems and you should use the built-in save mechanism). You can easily carry whatever Wiki you want with you as a single file on USB stick or you can create and edit it at home and then upload it on your server (with editing controls disabled, so that you don't confuse the visitors).

Wonderful...

UPDATE: If you want something more traditional, server-based, but without need of standalone server or database, try Instiki, written entirely in Ruby.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the link, Frantisek. It's the easiest Wiki implementation I've ever seen.

Anonymous said...

Cannot get it. I thought, the case for Wiki is the is the possibility of colaboration. What is Wiki for, if you are carrying it around on an USB stick ? Isn't a plaintext file much more comfortable and universal to work with ?

František Fuka said...

anonymous: In this case, the (single user) Wiki is nice to use for HTML-like navigation between short information snippets (I needed it to put together some development ideas for one of my projects).

garcon: I have tried VIM once and ran screaming.

Anonymous said...

Well Fuxoft, you are right, hypertext would be a nice feature to have in text files...

Anonymous said...

An post scriptum: if putting ideas together, have you considered FreeMind ? It quite helps me to sort out my ideas...

Anonymous said...

I really do like this script! It's something a little different, but for me very usefull!