Wednesday, June 01, 2005

wiki wiki wiki

i just got home from work where i was evaluating a variety of tiddlywikis...

background: a wiki is a web application that allows users to enter content and allows anyone to edit it... the most famous example is wikipedia...

a tiddlywiki is a kind of private wiki stored in a single local html file...

i was evaluating them for use at work for personal documentation of all the work related stuff i forget or might need to share with cow-orkers or whatever (e.g. there's a lot of common SQL tasks we do that i somehow always wind up having to look through old scripts or google to find again because i just can't seem to remember the exact syntax and i'd like to not have to go to all that trouble)...

there are 5 that i looked at, TiddlyWiki, GTDTiddlyWiki, TagglyWiki, GTDTagglyWiki, and TiddlyTagWiki...

as soon as i found the tagging ones i lost interest in the others... i like tagging a lot.. having a simple way to organize your data according to your own semantics is a lot more useful than it sounds...

so anyways, of the tagging ones i really liked TiddlyTagWiki for the fact that it's tags were a space-separated list (like del.icio.us) and the UI was better than either of the GTD variants, but it's UI wasn't perfect... the fact that the list of used tags was set so far apart from the other methods for organizing entries (Timeline and All) was a bit of an eye sore but even worse, as your tag list grows it pushes other useful features off the bottom of the screen!

TagglyWiki and GTDTagglyWiki both put the tags together with the Timeline and All views and avoid putting anything particularly useful underneath (in fact GTDTagglyWiki is just TagglyWiki with a GTD template applied to it, but since i wasn't trying to do a GTD system that really wasn't all that interesting to me)... unfortunately they implement their entry tagging as a comma seperated list which is annoying but not unbearable and it's really the only problem i had with it (beside the colour and the fact that the empty one you're supposed to download is so empty that the documentation entries are blank)...

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