Sean’s Blog

Tiddlywiki Howto

Just a quick and dirty howto for tiddlywiki

Yesterday, Lifehacker posted a howto on setting up a portable personal wiki. To me (and a good portion of other commenters) it seemed like overkill. It also showed me that alot of people are looking for something light, flexible, and cross-platform. This perfectly describes a tiddlywiki.

A Tiddlywiki is a page that works as a notebook (although it is not limted to this). Generally, the way i use it is when I get an idea I create a new tiddler and add my notes to it. I’ll tag it, revise it, and hopefully do something with it eventually. The easist way to understand all this is to actually create a Tiddlywiki and start using it which I will walk you through.

Please be aware tiddlywikis can range from extremely simple to really complex (take a look at one of my favorites MonkeyGTD, a tiddly based GTD system). I am no pro on the behind the scenes working of the tiddly and what we create will just be a simple notebook.

First head over to TiddlyWiki.org and download a blank Tiddlywiki . The tiddlywiki will come just as a html file that we will save and work with locally. I tend to keep mine with my on a thumbdrive. The first time you open the tiddlywiki in your browser is will look like this:

Now we can start customizing it. First off we can change the title and subtitle. Click on the SiteTitle and then click on edit. Name it something.

Do the same for the SiteSubtitle. Add your username so you will see who made changes (really useful for multiple users on the same tiddlywiki).

Now we can create some tiddlers. For each post you can tag it with whatever is appropriate. Multiple word tags should be enclosed in double square brackets like some tag.

I also don’t want the default getting started screen whenever I fire up my tiddlywiki We can edit that by changing the default tiddler. First I create a tiddler that I want to display. Here are some quotes and I call it Quotes. I then add Quotes to the default tiddler and it will be displayed when we log in.

A couple other tips:

•  Make sure you save your changes before you close the tiddlywiki or navigate away.
• I dislike the backup function so I disable it in Options (uncheck SaveBackups).
• You can have an online tiddlywiki over at tiddlyspot.com.
• Check out the Journal function on the side for dated entries.

This is only a small sample of what you can do with tiddlywikis. I have found them a incredibly useful tool that I use all the time.