Create A Free Personal Wiki For Your Notes With TiddlySpace

Create A Free Personal Wiki For Your Notes With TiddlySpace:

Our story starts with something called TiddlyWiki. In a nutshell, TiddlyWiki is a single-file wiki, which makes heavy use of JavaScript. You can download it to your own computer, Dropbox or USB stick, and use it to maintain notes about anything. That’s lovely, but it’s not exactly a website in the common sense of the word. In sweeps Osmosoft, BT’s open-source research arm. Osmosoft took TiddlyWiki and added server-side functionality and other bells and whistles, ending up with something they call TiddlySpace.

TiddlySpace lets you create, share, link and organize notes online. It’s a personal wiki, but with some interesting twists.

Okay, that’s a bit busy, at least at first glance. Let’s take a closer look at that Getting Started note, and see what can be easily configured:

Anything you want to change about your mini-site, you can change by editing special topics. A topic is called a “tiddler”, which is kind of like a Wiki page. It’s not called a “page” because the entire Wiki is one single page. For example, let’s change the site’s name by editing the appropriate tiddler:

Now that I’ve edited and saved the tiddler, the site title is instantly updated:

To create a new tiddler (note, topic) on your fledgling site, simply click the new tiddler button:

Now you can just start writing your content, and save it once you’re done:

The end result looks like this:

The formatting is done using simple Wiki syntax, so to create a bulleted list, I only needed to start each line with an asterisk. You can also easily create links to other topics, of course (and you shouldn’t take my note too seriously!).

Tiddlers are divided into categories, and you can navigate between them using the menu on the right. There’s a special kind of tiddlers called “Shadows”, which contain configuration information. The SiteTitle tiddler we’ve edited before is a good example for a Shadow tiddler. There are quite a few of these, and some of them don’t even look like wiki pages.

For example, here’s the Advanced Options tiddler:

You don’t necessarily have to share every note you make with the world; each note has a menu with several options, one of which being “make private”, which makes it so only you can read that note:

Each TiddlyWiki hosted by TiddlySpace is called a “space” (big surprise there, I know). Each space contains quite a few configuration options, but what’s most interesting is that you can enable a wide variety of plugins for added functionality.

Here’s a quick peek into the extensive list of plugins:

That’s just the beginning, and there’s definitely a learning curve here. Some plugins are not even documented with a single comment (such as TiddlySpaceCSRF – what is that supposed to mean?), but others are quite clear (and dare I say, cool) such as the ImageMacro plugin, which lets you add SVG images into your “space”.

TiddlySpace In The Wild

This is all a bit theoretical, I admit. Fortunately, TiddlySpace created a featured spaces page, showing a bit of what can be done with this interesting tool. Just two examples: TiddlyPocketBook shows how TiddlySpace can be used to create a slick cheat sheet:

The other example is called colmbritton, and shows a funky homepage, with lots of social tools in the sidebar:

Bottom Line

Is TiddlySpace for everyone? Certainly not. But if you’re looking for an innovative, low-overhead way to get your content out there and let your voice be heard, you really should take it for a spin.

Let us know if you use TiddlySpace or another wiki app. What do you like about it and why?