Posts tagged as: tiddlywiki

Lots of balls in the air

I've got so many projects ideas that I think I should list them, if only to remind me of where I want to go:

• CSS: Redesign Darwinianweb.com site to use style sheets.
• Ruby: Amazon API based app to determine the best book on a given subject.
• Ruby on Rails: Rebuild the CMS for this blog from the current FoxPro code.
• Ajax: Google API based app using Google Maps.
• Ajax: A stripped down version of TiddlyWiki as a form of self-modifying page.

I keep thinking about TiddlyWiki

The idea of a self-modifying webpage is definitely compelling. There are a lot of things about the TiddlyWiki interface I don't like, and it is misnamed, since it is a personal page, not a group editing page, but the idea of writing directly to a webpage without a server has struck a chord. I've been exploring the available resources, and Tiddly Wiki Mania and the Tiddly Wiki Dev discussion group seem like good places to start.

I looked over the Javascript code in the TiddlyWiki page and it seems pretty clean and understandable, although it is 82 pages long. I've been looking for a project to use in learning Ajax, and creating a simple version of a self-modifying page may be something I could have fun with.

Am I too old for this stuff?

I just discovered TiddlyWiki through a post on Ed Sim's Beyond VC blog. TiddlyWiki is a self-contained wiki system in a single web page.You can edit any portion of the page and then save the changes back to the same page. It is built with Javascript, so it is entirely client side. The changes don't go back to the server. You can save it on your own computer or carry it around on a USB flash memory card. I'm not sure how to explain it any further, because I'm not sure my head can hold onto the concepts implied by its use. How do others see the changes? How do I extract the changes from the page? I understood a wiki, because it is basically a client-server database with a user controlled interface, but this is a new kind of beast.

This reminds me of the time in early 1995 when I was first exploring webservers. I put a webserver on my own computer, logged onto it through Netscape, and then downloaded a file from my own computer back to my own computer. I tried to explain to my daughter, who was 12 at the time, that I had just copied a file from my computer in Boston, over the Internet backbone through a route that may have gone as far as Washington and back again in seconds. Her reaction was "So what?" I realized then that I was too fixated on the physical location of data and that my kids would grow up without that concept being so firm. Data to them is just something that is available when they need it, without thinking about "where" it is.

Now with TiddlyWiki I have to break my idea of data being "on" a server and then being displayed "in" a browser. I don't think our language or our minds are changing fast enough to keep up with these kinds of changes.