One of the neatest features of TiddlyWiki is that it is entirely self-contained in a single HTML file. It contains the actual hypertext document, and the JavaScript, CascadingStyleSheets and HTML necessary to both view and edit the document. This means that it is trivial to host a TiddlyWiki on a website, or to distribute one by email. And anyone with a reasonably recent web browser will be able to read and edit it.
MicroContent being a fashionable word for self-contained fragments of content that are typically smaller than entire pages. Often MicroContent is presented via some kind of aggregation that reduces the perceptual shock and resource cost of context switching (eg Blogs aggregating several entries onto a page or Flickr presenting photos in an album). This TiddlyWiki aggregates MicroContent items that I call 'tiddlers' into pages that are loaded in one gulp and progressively displayed as the user clicks hypertext links to read them.
When it loads, TiddlyWiki looks for the names of tiddlers to open as a space-separated list after the # in the URL. If there are no tiddlers in the URL it instead loads the tiddlers named in DefaultTiddlers, one of the SpecialTiddlers.
''Bold''\n==Strike==\n__Underline__\n//Italic//\n2^^3^^=8\na~~ij~~ = -a~~ji~~\n@@highlight@@\n@@color(green):green colored@@\n@@bgcolor(#ff0000):color(#ffffff):red colored@@
You can divide a tiddler into\n----\nsections by typing four dashes on a line by themselves
!Header 1\n!!Header 2\n!!!Header 3\n!!!!Header 4\n!!!!!Header 5\n
Putting TiddlyWiki on a USB thumb drive lets you carry around a SelfContained notebook that you can update wherever there's a reasonably modern computer, whether it's a Mac, Linux or a PC. (To be even more independent you can [[install FireFox on the drive|http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#oth_usb]] as well).
Released in September 2004, the [[first version|firstversion.html]] was pretty basic, weighing in at 52KB.
Released in December 2004, the [[second version|secondversion.html]] of TiddlyWiki grew 50% over the FirstVersion to 76KB. It added IncrementalSearch, the ReferencesButton, the PermaLinkButton, PermaView, CloseAll, SmoothScrolling, an ImprovedSidebar, an animation for the CloseButton and a tiny EasterEgg in homage to Macintosh OS X. It also introduced a new SiteDesign.
InternetExplorer on Windows allows you to SaveChanges in TiddlyWiki. It will give you an ActiveX warning, and ask for your permission to proceed each time. It should work from version 4, but I have only extensively tested against version 6. I have found some annoying difficulties with XpServicePack2, but there's always FireFox.
A WikiWord is a word composed of a bunch of other words slammed together with each of their first letters capitalised. WikiWord notation in a conventional WikiWikiWeb is used to name individual pages while TiddlyWiki uses WikiWord titles for smaller chunks of MicroContent. Referring to a page with a WikiWord automatically creates a link to it. Clicking on a link jumps to that page or, if it doesn't exist, to an editor to create it. This ThirdVersion of TiddlyWiki also adds NonWikiWordLinks.
A Wiki is a popular way of building collaborative websites. It's based on the ideas of easy editing of pages and the use of special WikiWord notation to automagically create links between pages. See Wikipedia for [[more details|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki]]. TiddlyWiki is different from a conventional Wiki because it is not based on entire pages of content, but rather items of MicroContent that are referred to as 'tiddlers'.
A row of ToolbarButtons appears to the right of a tiddler title when the mouse is hovered over it. The buttons are:\n* ''close'' - close the current tiddler\n* ''edit'' - edit the current tiddler\n* ''permalink'' - puts a link direct to the current tiddler into the address bar\n* ''references'' - displays all the tiddlers that link to the current tiddler\n* ''done'' - save changes to a tiddler being editted\n* ''cancel'' - cancel changes to a tiddler being editted\n* ''delete'' - delete the current tiddler
I'm hoping that after using TiddlyWiki for a while a new WritingStyle will emerge that is appropriate for this medium. Jakob Neilsen wrote an article about [[writing styles|http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980906.html]] for MicroContent back in 1998 that still seems surprisingly relevant.
TiddlyWiki doesn't have a server-side back end at the moment, so when you SaveChanges you're saving the whole document, as you would with Microsoft Word. That means that it is essentially only really a SingleUser thing (unless it gets passed round as a ChainTiddlyWiki). There are several TiddlyWikiAdaptations that //do// have a ServerSide, though.
TiddlyWiki uses several special tiddlers to hold the text used for the MainMenu, the SiteTitle and the SiteSubtitle. DefaultTiddlers is used to store the titles of the tiddlers that are shown at startup. SaveChanges is automatically displayed if there's a problem with saving. Any of them can be editted with the changes taking effect immediately.
When you type more than three characters in the search box at the upper right, any matching tiddlers are automatically displayed with the text highlighted. There's a couple of minor issues: the highlights don't get removed when you clear the search, and occasionally, on some browsers, keystrokes get missed if you type quickly so you may need to click the 'search' button to manually trigger the search.
I think this feature from the SecondVersion of TiddlyWiki is quite original. It's a button in the right-hand sidebar that sets the browser address bar to a URL embodying all the currently open tiddlers in the order that they are currently shown. To use it, arrange the open tiddlers that you want, click the permaview button, copy the URL from the browser address bar, and then paste it into an email, web page or whatever.
The rules governing where a tiddler is displayed sound complicated written down. When you clic