TiddlyWiki

I've been throwing around a few personal project ideas with a colleague at work recently. Just general stuff in the "what if?" scenario style, nothing too serious, but we're both of the opinion that our next job will have to be working for ourselves, the corporate grind has finally done for us.

To aid in our blue sky discussions, and individual thought, I was looking for some software that could organise these ideas (which have been wide and varied) into a more cohesive form to allow for further investigation before they're lost in the mists of my memory.

Being aware of 37signals various offerings I revisited my free Basecamp account I'd set up last year. I then remembered why I'd lost interest in it. To use it for anything of real worth you needed to subscribe to one of their premium services particularly for file upload and storage. The new offerings such as Writeboards are interesting and I can see a real benefit for Small to Medium Enterprises in project management etc. but after a couple of weeks I decided to look for something more suited to my needs.

But what did I want the software to do? Well, basically capture ideas, things of interest, documents, images, URLs etc. in bite sized chunks but have them at my fingertips at all times ready for browsing or editing. I don't intend to share this info with other people so an online requirement wasn't a necessity, as long as I could get at the information was all that mattered. Enter TiddlyWiki (open source and free).

It's practically impossible to describe what TiddlyWiki is and their own tag line of "a reusable non-linear personal web notebook" doesn't do it justice either. After reading the website I'm sure you'll still be scratching your head (like me) as to what it's all about (a better overview can be read here). Trust me on this, a better way of capturing and displaying information is hard to imagine. It took me a few hours playing with it to get my head around the concept but once you do it's brilliant. Give it a go. My TidllyWiki is always with me on a USB stick and on the home network but you can have it online as well (it's just a single html file).

Category:

• Tiddlywiki
• 37signals
• Software