Actually, a better question would be, What don’t I use TiddlyWiki for?
TiddlyWiki is the engine of my academic life. I have lots of other uses (bills, recipes, trip-planning, gift ideas, nature-learning-notes, etc.), but those may not be so distinctive. So here’s a tour of some of my public-facing wikis, mostly aimed at students.
Every course I teach has a TiddlyWIki for students. My first student-directed TiddlyWiki project, reasoningwell, is from 2005 (and I keep it served up just as a nostalgia TWC site). The most developed one, intro to ethics, has had a TiddlyWiki continuously available to students since 2008 (TW Classic for most of that time, of course). What you can’t see, in the public-facing version, is that the site opens up student-specific tiddlers when it’s viewed from within the moodle LMS (university’s password-authenticated learning management system). Students can see feedback that’s specific to them, as well as an overview of their progress on a couple of the ongoing assignment-challenges. Some pretty convoluted techniques offer decent-enough privacy protections (so that confidential student info is not on display for other students, though they can still see other students’ “microessay” assignments plus my feedback on them). Meanwhile other data-design decisions reduce the meaningfulness of the information a savvy web visitor would be able to extract (even if they were looking at the whole JSON source).
Another wiki offers “coaching” for writing projects, including explanation and examples for various bits of writing-clarity feedback I find myself giving to students on essays. It’s not specific to any one course, but serves as a common resource in connection with writing assignments. (I have a compact permalink structure so I can email a student with a link that opens up exactly the set of tiddlers that corresponds to the common feedback points I’ve flaggod on a particular submitted piece of writing.) Just for fun, another wiki I’ve made is intended specifically for learners of English who want to figure out how expressions like “figure out” (or “keep up” or “get along”) work in English. It’s called phrasal-verbs. The fun of that site: It has links to pop song lyrics (with audio iframes) to illustrate many of these phrases (“Carry On My Wayward Son”; “Never Gonna Give You Up”; “Walk on by” etc.)
As mentioned in a recent post here, a bibliographic wiki is under continual development. It’s based on the bibtex (JSON) standard, and it serves as the hub for all the books and articles that I have in my personal collection, as well as others that I reference in my research (also done with TiddlyWiki, but not for public consumption) and/or teaching. For this wiki, I’ve been developing functions that allow for “common sense” parsing of fields that are actally somewhat complicated — specifically names (where variants of the same name may appear in records imported from different sources). It also showcases a variation on Jeremy’s custom-story-river cascade “fan” template, applied here to book cover images. As noted in a recent thread, the tiddlers for all books and articles I deal with live in this wiki, but can be automatically (based on a filter) “imported” into the content-area-specific wikis I’m using for a class or research project. This workflow ensures that biblio-specific content has one authoritative source.
(I also use TiddlyWiki as the engine of every academic conference presentation and guest lecture, though these wikis tends to be work in progress that is not public. It’s fantastic to be able, in a Q&A, to pull up full info on any related source, as well as lots of second-tier tiddlers that were cut from the main presentation but which elaborate on a point or delve into future questions, etc. Unlike PowerPoint, a TiddlyWiki presentation tool doesn’t lock me into a linear path, and responds to css makeovers with grace and actual fun.)
On a different wavelength (in terms of public-facing informational wiki-types that may be distinctively “mine”) — here’s a compendium of video resources for aikido, developed while studying for my shodan test a few years ago. It uses custom dynamic table templates so that we can see a huge graphic chart of how each of the basic “attacks” we study (columns) might be met with particular techniques of response (rows) — with links to video demonstrations by various teachers in the corresponding cell. It’s not actively mantained, so some of the actual video links have gone missing (as tends to happen with media hosted by others), but you can still see how the concept works.
OK, and of course any TiddlyWiki geek has TiddlyWikis about TiddlyWiki. In addition to the banner-image contest archive, there’s one for google fonts (intended to make it super-simple for visitors to compare the fonts, test them, and get fonts up and running in your own wiki), and the quick-demo site which is just my personal (occasionally talk.tiddlywiki-facing) repository for tips and tricks, half-baked experiments, and a few personal best-practices rants.
re-creating from scratch
