Introducing the Wiki Wallet: TiddlyFolio
Oct 26th, 2007 by Eats Wombats
Got too many passwords? Keeping track of them all can be a headache. I have over 200 and the number grows inexorably.
Ever lost your wallet or had it stolen? Can you, without looking, make a detailed list of everything that’s in it so that you can make a loss report, cancel your credit cards and begin getting replacements for everything you need? Can you do it in seconds?
Click here for a free, open source, cross-platform solution: TiddlyFolio.
It’s a single HTML file in the form of an electronic wiki wallet for secure storage of key information, ideally suited to living on a USB memory stick on your key ring. You may also synchronize the encrypted contents with a free web site hosted at TiddlySpot.com; instructions in the file.
Over the years I have looked many software solutions for recording passwords and storing them in a safely encrypted form, and I have used a few. You can find some reviews and a list of some well known ones here.
I last used TK8 Password Safe from TK8. The poor review on the site above is undeserved in my opinion. It’s an excellent program and the small company behind it, located in Estonia, is highly responsive and a pleasure to deal with.
Skype originated in Estonia and the country sometimes calls itself E-stonia because it’s so wired. Contrary to the implication in the review, support is a non-issue. The nameTK8 comes from the founder: Tonis Kask — the 8th! You may judge for yourself why free programs are not included in this list. The best of these is KeePass Password Safe. It’s open source and so runs on a variety of operating systems and hardware.
Until recently I didn’t use Linux enough to need another password program. Now I do and TK8 Password Safe is a Windows-only solution, so it was time for me to change. I wanted something that would store my passwords securely in a form that would allow me to access them
- on any computer (e.g., via a USB stick), including
- computers on which I couldn’t install software, and…
- via the web at any time.
That ruled out KeePass Password Safe and also Roboform, which is probably the best of the commercial options, especially if you fill in a lot of web forms (video here). I used a remarkably useful tool called TiddlyWiki, which can be extended and customised in many ways and, with the help of some plugins, created an application I’ve called TiddlyFolio. It uses a web browser and will work on any computer with Java.
If you lose your wallet, here’s what should happen: you open the file, click on Emergency, generate a report, which you then communicate to your single point of contact for cancelling cards, if you have one. Alternatively, you can use the report to contact each of the companies individually.
If you’ve lost your keys and memory stick as well as your wallet, you know that your data on your key ring is secure (unreadable) and, if you’ve uploaded it to TiddlySpot, you can log in there and do the needful. (Just make sure that you always upload encrypted data.) You can, of course, also save the file to online storage of your own.
TiddlyFolio is officially a beta release. However, it’s unlikely to change much before it becomes v1.0; the version number is on the front page so you can check it. Note: It’s primarily for Firefox, though it can work with Internet Explorer (instructions included) — the wiki includes some images which do not display in IE until they’ve been saved locally. Functionally there’s no difference.
Once you’ve got the contents of your wallet recorded in TiddlyFolio you just need to update it whenever you put something new in your wallet. It’s a useful complement to a service like Credit Card Sentinel / Sentinel Gold or, if you don’t care for the insurance, a way of saving money by doing it yourself.
This sounds like a really good solution, and I started to play with it at work, but for someone who has never used a tiddlywiki (except on an abortive and pointless attempt to put GTD on a machine, I was all at sea.
No doubt I will get there, but it seemed to me that the instructions were maybe a little too terse.
TiddlyWikis can be somewhere between deceptively simple and frustratingly opaque. It’s easy to download one and futz with plugins, find dead ends and give up (though the Google groups community is V helpful). I also gave up at first, when trying to create this. Start here if you want to see what can be done with a little software Lego.
As a single file contains everything (java code, documentation, data and illustrations) I tried to be concise. If you let me know anything that’s not clear I’ll clarify it.
I also never got on with any GTD implementation using TiddlyWiki, partly as I was already using MyLifeOrganized (MLO) and a) had learned that sticking with something matters more than finding a perfect tool, and b) it wasn’t sufficiently compelling. MLO is a PC + MS handheld solution only. A version is free and just might be worth running XP on your Mac for, or trying if you are already doing that.
Another free and cross-platform implementation I’ve seen and liked was phpGTD. It works and is readily hackable, and I might have gone with it if I was au fait with PHP earlier. It’s not cute like iGTD, Midnight Inbox and other Mac solutions. The software, in the end, doesn’t really matter. It’s the journey.
TF is far simpler than any GTD solutions of course. It’s now in the TW solutions gallery under “special goodies.”
It’s lunchtime, and I’m eating al desko, so an opportunity for another play. Thanks for the pointer to the Mac page. That helped a bit. I think the crucial aspect of what you’ve done is to link to TiddlySpot. That, I reckon, might be the missing link. Especially if uploading to TiddlySpot can be automated. I’m sure it can …
If you have your own web-accessible online storage there may be no need for TiddlySpot at all. There’s a webDAV plugin available but I haven’t tried it, I just save to my own webDAV storage on Fastmail; it looks like a local drive and I can get to it, with a login, from any web browser.
You can run quite a decent a little personal website in a single file if you want to. Here’s a nice example. I find uploads to TiddlySpot a little slower than I’d like, but knowing that you can get to all your passwords and other get out of jail data in seconds is, what’s the word, priceless? Hmm. Maybe that would have been a better name.
BTW if you are going to hack TiddyWiki files Notepad++ is worth a look.
8th August 2008:
TiddlyFolio has been updated to use the latest TiddlyWiki core (v2.4.1). Many
plugins and macros have also been updated. Functionality is largely
unchanged (passwords now masked on entry); however, future core upgrades should be possible via TiddlyWiki’s upgrade function.
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