Thanks @Charlie_Veniot that is really interesting
Bobj
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.
Just like other posters, it’s nothing too fancy:
I am also planning to use TiddlyWiki for much more:
But I’ll take the liberty to slightly slide away from the topic and write WHY I ended using TIddlyWiki.
My first digital notes were a single text file. Eventually I switched to multiple text files spread across a directory tree. At some point the flat text inside the text files started to get structured into paragraphs/lists.
The next level of evolution was discovering trees. In text files the simplest way to implement them was to use nested lists.
Being a Vim user, eventually I discovered https://vim-voom.github.io and started to use it for managing the text files.
After a couple of years I’ve realized that plain text lacks an essential feature provided by markup - hyperlinking. I discovered Leo's Home Page which is essentially a tree managing outliner, but allows node clones, effectively turning the tree into a graph.
Then Markdown gained traction, I switched to wikis like everyone, used GitHub - vimwiki/vimwiki: Personal Wiki for Vim, used the built-in wiki of Fossil: A Coherent Software Configuration Management System . All great pieces of software until my requirements grew up because I changed my personal threat model.
I decided that all my personal data has to be stored encrypted only. I switched to Full Disk Encryption on computer, started to use LUKS containers for data transfers across the network… then my desktop died and I remained with a non-rooted Android phone. That’s when I realized that my files already have to be encrypted themselves, so I could use them on such a device. Besides providing a very flexible query language (superior to Full Text Search) that could be applied to tiddlers, TiddlyWiki also offered full single file wiki encryption, and backwards compatibility with my previous workflows, since I could always export the encrypted single file wiki to a one-file-per-tiddler scenario driven by Node.js running on a FDE computer (if only Node.js and full featured GUI browsers could still work on VERY OLD computers, because I still have one of those, and it’s still functional, but alas)
World domination.
…Just kidding. Well, not really.
The question comes up a lot. I’d say: I use it to store things. Passwords, accounts, addresses, phone numbers, snippets of text.
And then, I use it for lists. Only 5 months 'till Christmas.
No, sorry. I’m much too wordy for that.
21 months ago I described a substantial documentation project done in TW and then listed a number of other things I’d been doing in TW:
Since then, I’ve also started a number of other projects:
Now, of this second batch, only the town charter can be considered anything like complete.
Interestingly, there is nothing here about a personal journal. Not only that, almost all my wikis are for other people, instead of (or as well as) for myself.
I have three work wiki’s. The Primary one is used to share information with the team. It includes guides on how to do certain tasks, information on how the things we support work, incident case studies usually around the strange and difficult to deal with problems that occur. My second one is a rough notes wiki designed for myself and once I’ve tidied things up enough and written it so others can understand I transfer it to the main one. The third is information related to myself and the job that is not team related. Sometimes copies of important emails I’ve received.
For Home the main wiki I use is my Journal Wiki which I’ve split into three separate single wiki’s for now for accessible reasons on my phone. The 'child wiki’s I port over the last days worth of changes to the main one on a regular (usually daily) basis. The child wiki’s catalogue my media library and track activities and appointments. The main one have daily entries along with articles on specific topics, or events. I spend and awful lot of personal time on these three wikis and often think I’ve gone a little overboard on it but this is where I’ve learned the most regarding the features of Tiddlywiki.
I also have a journal regarding my house which I started when my offer to the house was first accepted. It contains information such as event history of the house, furniture details, suppliers and contact information.
I have a family tree wiki which I hope to integrate with journal wiki at some point. There is also a contact one that contains contact information of friends and former colleagues. I have a few creative writing project wiki’s which are mostly my own. I have one archiving the stories, poems and other creative works a colleague who has since passed away shared with me via email over the years.
When Chat-GTP first arrived I started a ‘Conversations-With-AI’ wiki to record my interactions with it and other AI systems but I’ve never subscribed to any of those services and seldom use them any more.
In preparations for holidays (vacations) I usually create (or modify) a wiki that will contain my flight and hotel information as well as information on the places I hope/ plan to visit.
There’s a number of others I seldom use at the moment, often based on ones that others in the community has shared (such as Projectify and Tekan).
I first used TiddlyWiki for personal notes, but quickly started using it for more diverse use
I currently have multiple local TiddlyWiki :
I also use TiddlyWiki to create some “tools” :
And I am also promoting TiddlyWiki internally at my job and around me, to our political deciders and public organism. I had two success :
I use TiddlyWiki for… everything!
I use Tiddlywiki for:
jumps up and down excitedly link?!
Oh let me count the ways though compared to some of the answers mine seem positively pedestrian!
I have an engineering textbook
A student notebook which I will update with Evans formula plugin and one academic year (maybe this one) push onto my students.
I have a curriculum planning wiki which I need to plan more with.
And a prod it and see what breaks wiki for trying out plugins and wikitext
Right. Every time I’ve had a leadership role on a committee, practically the first thing I do is to set up a TiddlyWiki with all of the bylaws, handbooks, and other regulatory text that’s out there, freelinked and filled out with metadata. Then the same wiki gets incoming communications and requests, agendas and meeting minutes, roles and terms of members, annual reports, etc. How anyone handles running an organization without TiddlyWiki, I do not know.
I can share, it’s not a problem but it’s in Brazilian Portuguese
I just need to wipe some personal notes
I use TiddlyWiki…
…to keep track of information I need to have on hand for work
…as a to do list
…for taking notes on reading
…for processing the brainstorming which I write by hand
…for tracking my reading progress across my books
…to produce web materials at Índice central — giffmex.org/b/, some as static htmls
…for the website for my wife and me https://giffmex.org
…for experimenting with new things produced by everyone here
…for documenting how to do things in TiddlyWiki, here: Documenting TW — a non-linear personal web notebook
I use TiddlyWiki to…
And many more various and sundry things…
I’m planning to begin taking my 10+ year records of Movie and TV Show viewing logs from a program named RedNotebook and convert them into Tiddlers so I can add Posters, DVD/Blu-Ray Cover Art, Screenshots, etc., and have the ability to easily add Comments, Notes, Reviews, whatever in fields so it’s all searchable. Thanks for the idea, @Lamnatos !
Oh, and @Springer – I LOVED your Tiddler with the Google Fonts - I have something similar (but much more crude) in one of my reference Tiddlers, but I’m going to steal borrow some ideas from yours
Also (maybe in a separate thread…?) could you perhaps explain a bit more or show some examples of how you did the Field as TextArea? – I’ve long desired to have this functionality as I have several TW’s that make use of Fields, some with ridiculously large amounts of text/HTML/CSS, and it’s a real pain when having to edit them, as you can only see the single line of content at once…
I’m sure the implementation is probably a very simple matter, but I’m just not seeing/getting it. I pasted the code into a Tiddler and it worked, of course, but the actual code itself then appears - How would I incorporate it globally so that I could use it in any Tiddler, and without the code showing?
Belatedly, I don’t use TW5 at this time (had an experimental one but it didn’t go anywhere and a rogue crawler forced me to take it down). However, I use the Classic edition and competing apps for purposes like:
Been circling TW5 again now that performance gains in 5.3.7 make it more attractive, but likely for other similar projects, not anything substantially different.
Classic had/has the same girding as TW later has. Looks good to me.
Both are very agnostic.
Meaning their main architecture avoids “cloud-dependency” and “sharing too early”.
I’m much interested in @jeremyruston’s holding-fast to not becoming a big-bucks “influencer”.
Eek! This post reads a bit paranoid.
Right.
What World are you currently building?
Best, TT
p.s. Nose Is an interesting word. Your cat may “Nose about” being “Nosy” but is it ever “NosEy”? Nosy v. Nosey.
I use my TW as mostly a reading notebook. It started when I was in hospital in 2022 with COVID - I took all the vaccinations but I when they tested me had none of the anti-bodies!
I was in for a week and had my phone and was looking for a lightweight non-linear note taking app for a reading project I was doing. I found TW and installed it on my Android phone using the node.js form and running the server on my Termux app and using the browser as the client.
It started as a specific reading project - I was sixty and reading books written in 1962 my birth year.
When I got home I started adding to a separate Instance of TW my general reading.
I learnt to merge the two instances and created the current one. It focuses on books but is likely to grow.
Firstly to record music/CDs as well as DVDs - then other stuff.
I treat it with backlinks as a Zettelkasten - based on the ideas of Niklas Luhmann who was a local professor here.