Recently it was suggested that the Habari project think about using Tiddlywiki as a means to ship documentation with new releases. At first, I wasn’t sure about the idea, but after about 15 minutes of working with it, I was hooked. For those not familiar with Tiddlywiki, it’s a very light weight (single file) mini wiki. I’ve seen it described as “guerrilla” wiki, or the “ipod nano” of wikis. It highly leverages javascript to hide and show “tiddlers”, or the individual entries. With lots of available plugins and custom themes, not to mention a very active community, TW is certainly a great contribution to the web community, and something worth checking out. Those that are into the Getting Things Done, there’s a couple of GTD inspired adaptation, GTDTiddlyWiki, and MonkeyGTD. There’s also a FireFox extension, TiddlySnip that allows you to save snippets to your TW as a scrapbook of sorts, though I haven’t tested this extension yet.
The formatting in TW is different than MediaWiki, though it’s fairly easy to get used to. There’s also a MediaWiki formatter, which allows you to use that formatting in your TW (which is handy if you are copying info from a MW page. The same plugin author is working on an importer, which I am investigating, which actually allows you to scrape MW entries right into your TW.
All in all, I find TW a great tool, and something I will continue to work with for a variety of uses, and hopefully will open my eyes to learning more javascripting along the way.