I’ve just created a new GitHub repository containing a raw archive of the coverage of TiddlyWiki from blogs, tweets, and podcasts when it was first launched in 2004.
I’ve told the story before of how I posted a very crude first version of TiddlyWiki on 20th September 2004. I made a post on del.icio.us which at the time was the dominant link aggregator for Web 2.0, as it was called at the time. Two days later it was picked up by Jason Kottke, who wrote a popular blog around Web 2.0. His post triggered an avalanche of coverage. It was exhilarating and also overwhelming, in a good way.
I started to collect screenshots and archives of blog posts and other material about it (in a folder aptly called “Vanity”). Characteristically, after a few months I rarely added to it.
Much of the commentary is of the form “wow I didn’t know browsers could do this”. There was also some thoughtful appreciation of TiddlyWiki’s qualities as a wiki. Kottke’s original post has both perspectives:
Ok, this is the first wiki interface I’ve seen that has real potential
Dunno quite why exactly, but this blows my mind.
There are over a thousand items in the archive, in a variety of formats: PNG, HTML and webarchive (a proprietary format only readable by Apple’s Safari).
At the moment the archive is not very easy to browse. The PNG files are viewable as a solid stream in the readme of the GitHub repo, but the HTML files and webarchive files are not easily accessible, and nothing is easily searchable. Nonetheless, the PNGs are interesting to read.
Might anyone be interested in helping improve the archive? It would be some light editorial work to make the most interesting material visible, perhaps ideally in a new wiki on tw (dot) com.
See the repo:
Here’s Kottke’s post:
