Use Your Words, another blog by J. K. Hoffman

Like Wikipedia, but on the micro scale.

It may surprise some readers here that I’m a geek in my professional life.  (Okay, so it may not have surprised many readers, but, still…)  And, as such, I tend to use computers in a lot of my daily life, including my creative life.  One tool that I’ve been experimenting with a bit is tiny, low-overhead wikis, sort of like a tiny, personal Wikipedia, only it’s on my desktop and not publicly available via the internet.

I looked at a lot of tiny, simple wikis, but I eventually went with TiddlyWiki.
There are a couple reasons why, but, mostly because it’s contained in a single, simple file.  Also, in spite of its incredible simplicity, TiddlyWiki has an amazing amount of flexibility and expandability.  For example, there are JavaScript-based plugins that you can add to do all sorts of things, including, but not limited to creating beautiful timelines, calendars, tables of contents, and tag clouds.  Really the possibilities seem almost endless!  (Most of the best add-on tools are collected at TiddlyTools, a TiddlyWiki-based website.)
There’s also the ability to add a theme to your TiddlyWiki, which can change the look and feel of the entire wiki in a few short steps.  You can browse some examples of TiddlyWiki themes at the cleverly named TiddlyThemes site.

One of the bigger reasons I like TiddlyWiki, though, is the documentation and guides.  The main site, TiddlyWiki, has great information to get you started and links to a lot of other great resources.  Most of what you need to know to really get started is right there, but if you find yourself getting into more advanced stuff, I recommend getting over to tiddlywiki – a TiddlySpace, where they have even more user-created documentation.  Between these two sites, I think pretty much all the questions I could come up with were answered.  And, I have to mention, for a pretty geeky, little tool, TiddlyWiki has a surprisingly large community around it.  That makes it cool, too, because you know that other people are out there doing stuff that you can learn from or looking to do the things you’re doing so you can share with them.  Either way, knowing that there are growing resources for help, I think, helps make TiddlyWiki a great choice for personal projects.

So, now the question is, what to use it for?
Everything.
No, seriously, people use this for all kinds of things.  Are you a fan of David Allen‘s Getting Things Done?  Well, people have used TiddlyWiki for that, and even written an article about it on Lifehacker.  And, it makes a great way to have a small, simple set of documentation for a small group or organization, like a small computer services department.
Theoretically, you can use it as a website, but I’m not comfortable with that functionality.  I’m a little funny about putting work out there in such a way that strangers might too easily deface it.  It’s just my old-fashioned way of thinking.
Personally, I started getting interested in personal wikis when I was exploring an idea for a series of interconnected stories set in an alternate future.  I had in mind to maintain a private wiki that was configured rather like Wikipedia, but specifically for my crazy future.  In fact, I went so far as to integrate the somewhat difficult timeline feature that someone created, but has apparently since abandoned, into a kind of default template that I started using.  (Well, okay, “messing around with” is probably more accurate, since I never did follow through on that alternate future.)  In fact, if you’d like, you can download that template I created, which includes the timeline functions and some theme stuff, you can download it here:EmptyTiddlyWiki  You won’t really need the subdirectory of images or the example.xml file, which is just for the timeline examples, but I included them anyway.

So, now you have an easy to use tool for making hyper-linked documentation for yourself or a small group.  How will you use it?  How can you leverage this creatively to make producing work easier?

Update: Just an FYI.  I added a couple of nodes to that default wiki template I uploaded before, to help the person who’s new to wikis with formatting.  It seemed useful, so I updated the archive attached to this post.  If you downloaded it before, you may want to grab it again.
Also, I’ve mentioned it in the included EmptyTiddlyWikiREADME.txt which is included in that archive, but I recommend copying that template to a new file name for each project for which you want to have a wiki.  No need to put them in separate subdirectories or anything, but separate file names make keeping the information straight a bit easier.