Notes-taking in the Digital Age
A few years ago I decided to find some way to digitize my personal notes. At that time I realized the notes I was jotting down were mainly a) related to digital resources (mostly stuff online); and b) intended to be used on some sort of computer, or made for the purpose of forging new digital resources. And so it seemed kind of stupid to take down notes off the screen - only to type them back into a computer later on. Not to mention the issue of revising notes.
I ended up using something called a TiddlyWiki as my digital notepad and have been doing so ever since. I have written about TiddlyWiki before but since I recently updated my TiddlyWiki setup and learned some new stuff, I have decided to write about it some more.
First, though - what is a TiddlyWiki?
A TiddlyWiki is a personal Wiki made up of »tiddlers« - the digital equivalent of a notebook entry. A tiddler is a piece of microcontent, stamped with the time of creation and possibly tagged by keywords. One of the beautiful things about a TiddlyWiki is that it is contained within a single HTML-file - all functionality is provided by javascript functions embedded within the HTML.
To see what a TiddlyWiki looks like, please feel free to take a look at mine: wiki.gersbo.dk (see tiddlers in the right hand timeline)
Before settling with TiddlyWiki, I looked at other note-taking tools - like OneNote and Google Notebook - but the simplicity of TiddlyWiki immediately appealed to me. For something like this you need a tool as »ready-at-hand« as Pen & Paper - or as close you can get, otherwise the tool will not be used. I also quickly came to appreciate the versatility of TiddlyWiki.
A TiddlyWiki can be stored on your computer's harddrive, on a USB thumb drive, on a network share or a FTP site. Furthermore, TiddlyWiki's can be extended by adding plugins and themes, and it is a very simple thing to do since both plugins and themes are just tiddlers themselves. To add functionality to a TiddlyWiki, you simply copy-paste tiddlers into it.
I use plugins that enable me to import and export tiddlers between TiddlyWiki files - I also use a plugin that enables me to store it on a web server and update it through the browser.
TiddlyWikis come in many flavours and variants, but it is very easy to get started with the basics:
- Download an empty TiddlyWiki from tiddlywiki.com.
- Add a theme (optional) to the TiddlyWiki.
- Add some plugins (optional) - my essential plugins are ImportTiddlersPlugin (copy tiddlers between TiddlyWikis) and UploadPlugin (keep and update a TiddlyWiki online).
- Add the TiddlySnip Firefox extension so that links and text selections can be added to the TiddlyWiki without opening it.
That last plugin is a godsend I have only discovered recently. It provides functionality similar to the "Note this" option from the Google Notebook Firefox extension. Using it, I can right-click on any web page - or some text selected in a page - and add a tiddler with it to my TiddlyWiki. Most useful for those interesting sites and nuggets of information you come across, but do not have the time to process right then and there.
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