Want To Play with a Wiki?

Want to play with a wiki and see what all the fuss is about. Stroll over to PBwiki, which has to be one of the easiest wiki systems I’ve stumbled across.

It has all the usual bells and whistles, RSS feeds, support for various languages, edit locks, and image uploading, but no WYSIWYG support, but there is a wikistyle markup that’s pretty simple and easy to learn.

Best of all, there are very few restrictions, and it’s free. Their motto “as easy to setup as a peanut butter sandwich”.

They aren’t kidding.

Now for something a little more local, go and have a look at TiddlyWiki by Jeremy Ruston, this is just so cool. It’s written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to run on any modern browser (I’m not entirely sure that IE scrapes in…) without needing any ServerSide logic, or even a server. It will allow you to create personal hypertext documents that can be posted to any webserver (the usual ftp upload) should you want, sent by email or kept on a USB thumb drive (this is where mine lives along with a “Portable Firefox” setup) to make a “WikiOnAStick“, and is published under an OpenSourceLicense (woo hoo).

I used a copy to track all my Java Programming class notes and code snippets last year. It was brilliant. I have also used a copy as a “project management tool“, all the meeting notes, questions, answers in one place, hyperlinked and timestamped. It really works for me. I just noticed that there is now a specially optimised version specifically for project management (I must go and have a closer look later).

There are student versions, Chinese versions, Getting Things Done versions, slideshow plugins.

It’s a pretty dynamic user community and a great piece of coding.