Dave Bacon is a theoretical ski bum who is also an assistant research 
I'm always behind the times. I just discovered Tiddlywiki and I love it!
What is TiddlyWiki? Well, okay, first of all it is a kind of wiki. But, here is the first interesting fact, it is a serverless wiki: TiddlyWiki is exactly one file. This file is written in a combination of html/Javascript/CSS, so you just view this one file in your browser. When you edit your wiki, it just updates this one file. How cool is that. This means, for example, that you can put your tiddlywiki on a thumb drive, and carry it around with you to use where ever you find a computer with a browser. Indeed because Firefox has a portable version you can fit the browser and wiki on the thumb drive. You can also keep a version uploaded to your website so you can access while not in possession of the local copy (see UploadPlugin).
I've always wanted to start a series of notebooks like Cosma's and TiddlyWiki seems like the perfect fit. Indeed my discovery of TiddlyWiki was inspired by a similar notebook project by a famous surfing physicist. I've started up using a personal TiddlyWiki for keeping a working journal/projects/todo and so far I am really liking the functionality that one can get. There are an amazing amount of plugins written for TiddlyWiki (LaTeX functionality is pretty smooth), as well as TiddlySnip which is a Firefox plugin for directly importing from web pages (note that you need the newest version to work correctly with Firefox 3..see here.)
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I also keep a tiddlywiki notebook (though it gets used less often than it should...), and the whole "web 2.0" feel makes it seem light-years ahead of everything else. (clicking a link to an item opens the item in the page, rather than having to load a new page, for those who haven't tried it.) Having said that, if you find a decent database-driven backend which can search at a reasonable speed, call me right away.
Posted by: Joe | June 24, 2008 5:52 PM
Yeah, the ability to edit in place by double clicking is sweet...definitely more natural than editing in say MediaWiki.
Posted by: Dave Bacon | June 24, 2008 5:55 PM
Joe, there is a server-side, SQL database driven version of Tiddlywiki called ccTiddly.
Posted by: Stephen | June 24, 2008 6:05 PM
I used TiddlyWiki for a while, and liked it a lot, but I just kept coming back to Tomboy. I've known other Tomboy users who left it for Tiddly, but I just liked being able to export nicely, have the menu on the taskbar for the various notes, and other small things like that.
Don't get me wrong... I think that TiddlyWiki is wonderful, and don't discourage people from using it. Just letting people know that if they don't quite mesh with the thinking behind it, that there's other stuff out there, like Tomboy. Sadly, Tomboy is Linux-only (for now-- cross-platform support is supposed to be in the next version).
Posted by: Chris Granade | June 24, 2008 6:50 PM