I’m a big fan of wikis and as a company we use them extensively. The cost benefit ratio simply cannot be ignored. One person solves the problem, publishes the answer on the wiki for X number of people to apply and tweak as time goes by. The only real hit is on the person publishing the content in the first place. That ain’t going to change, but…

…traditional wikis tend to be hosted on a web server. This is both good and bad. The good is accessibility, the bad is the dreaded HTTP request/response and the loss of client-side interaction. Now I wouldn’t consider myself a lazy person, but as I get older I strive to do more with less. When I have to add content to the wiki, the first thing I do is sigh. Why? Because its going to take at least 10 client/server round trips to navigate to the place I need to be, and then to add/edit the page, preview it and save it. As a content provider this sucks for me. There just has to be something better.

Then I found tiddlywiki. Nice! A client-side, highly interactive, javascript on steroids, wiki in a single file. Yep. A single file that you can transport around with you anywhere. Now for personal wikis this is great. But for team based wikis we need some sort of server but without giving up on the flexibility and interative nature of tiddlywiki. This is future work.

There have been some great innovations with tiddlywiki. Take for example, this Getting Things Done site. A few more plugins here and there and we could do some really neat project-specific stuff. For example, user story plugins and project tracking tools. The navigation is cool and the ease of downloading the entire wiki is sublime! If you wanted to mess about with tiddlywiki I suggest reading the tutorial and hosting your site at tiddlyspot.com. And last but by no means least, brush up on those Javascript skills…