“Romanticizing the Past

“Romanticizing the past” is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future.”

Paul Kingsnorth

Tiddlywiki…Again

Over the weekend I was exploring some of the hundreds of docker applications I could install on my Unraid server. I ran across Tiddlywiki which I have used frequently in the past. I decided to install it and play around a little with it.

I have never run Tiddlywiki on a server before and I found that it made using the application a lot more convenient. If you don’t know, at its simplest, Tiddlywiki is a personal desktop wiki application contained within a single HTML file. It is lightweight, portable and extremely flexible. Unfortunately, it has never been easy to save your work easily since every time you time save the file it saves the file as a new single HTML file. For example, if you make twenty changes to the file you will wind up with twenty different sequential versions of the file. It works but it is clunky and if you weren’t careful it was easy to lose your work. The extensive community that has emerged around Tiddlywiki has come up with several solutions to solve this problem including several plugins that allowed one to save your work like a traditional desktop application.

That’s wonderful. However, at work my browsers are locked down and I cannot install add-ons. So in the past I’ve resorted to the built-in save solution. It worked but I still had the problem of syncing my Tiddlywiki information between the office and home. I used to email my Tiddlywiki file to my house every night and that worked until I got lazy or I forgot to email myself.

Using Tiddlywiki again on my server allowed me to save my work easily and reminded me of how much I enjoyed using the application in the past. I found that it kept me more focused when I used the internet because I discovered that I was using the internet more intentionally. I noticed that using Tiddlywiki helped keep me from mindlessly surfing the internet as much because I now had a system where I could keep track of the web sites and information I was reading and accessing and integrate the material into a usable knowledge base.

Since I enjoyed using Tiddlywiki so much I am glad to think I have found a solution to my syncing problem – Tiddlyhost. Currently, on Tiddlyhost you can host your own Tiddlywiki file and access it anywhere you have an internet connection and since it is on a server version you can easily save your work with the click of a button.

There is a lot more I could add but I plan on writing more on this great application in the future.

For now here are some links to some resources to get you started.

Tiddlywiki – The Main Page – Start Here

GitHub Saver

Tiddlymemo

Tiddly Wiki 01 Intro (AKA Offline, No Cost, Flexible, Digital Notes) – Youtube Video

Tiddly Wiki 02 Basic Text Formatting – Youtube Video