Local homepage
I’ve used local homepages for years. Instead of a website being my “home” page, I’ve got a custom made page with links I use a lot. It’s quicker than using bookmarks. I’ve even used subpages linked from the first page for stuff I don’t use as often. But lately I’ve been thinking about a cross between that and a more structured way of gathering information.
There are several personal wikis out there. But most of them use software and save the pages in a way so that I can’t use them in a browser. And some are meant to sit on the web. That’s fine for public info, but not as secure for personal stuff.
I found that TiddlyWiki was usable. It’s a pain to set up initially, since they don’t give you a template that’s set up for personal use. It’s just an an empty version of the front page of their website. But if you’re willing to put in the time to edit in notepad, it’s quite interesting. A good idea would be for someone to make a customized one, but us geeks can manage for now.
Update: It’s less of a pain to setup than I thought. Open MainMenu and edit the categories there. Open DefaultTiddlers and edit out all the extraneous journal entries on the front page. Maybe add some tiddlers YOU would want there instead. Also use the Timeline menu on the right actively if some tiddler gets lost before you nail it down somewhere. Options (on the right beneath the search field) is good for making it autosave, changing default author and so on.
And this version is probably the best for a local browser homepage. It’s a “productivity” version:
http://shared.snapgrid.com/gtd_tiddlywiki.html
I’ve decided I’ll keep spam URL’s there for now, along with often used links. And I’ll retire the old homepage. Only gripe is that links open new windows, so I need to right click to use tabs instead. Update: Open the wiki in notepad, search for this and remove:
if(config.options.chkOpenInNewWindow)
theLink.target = “_blank”;
This wiki saves EVERYTHING in one file, so it’s highly portable. It probably becomes a beast once you’ve saved a lot of stuff, though.
My tip: You can include links to files on your harddrive, using the same syntax as links to websites. Make separate wikis for separate topics, if you expect to hoard lots of info, then interlink them from your main homepage wiki. Just save them in the same directory tree.
Also, it makes backups for each time you press Save Changes, so clean out the backups now and then.
I’ve only played with it for about 45 minutes, so I’ve only just scratched the surface.