Wanted: Goldilocks Wiki
Apr 29th, 2008 by Eats Wombats
Today I rediscovered Microsoft OneNote. I had tried it before, back when I was looking for something to help me implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) approach to staying organized. OneNote was a nice application but for what I wanted I preferred MyLifeOrganized.
Since then I’ve used a variety of wiki applications to manage information, mainly
which represent baby, mummy and daddy bear solutions respectively, all open source. There any number of wikis out there, as a glance at wikimatrix can confirm. If that site makes your eyes glaze over, you are not alone. Before you ask… do you have just one kind of footwear?
TiddlyWiki is nice web site in a single file solution that you can keep on a USB memory stick. I used to use it with the Firefox extension TiddlySnip, which made clipping notes from web pages and tagging them quite easy. It’s what I used to create TiddlyFolio, a wiki for recording securely the contents of your wallet (credit cards etc.). TiddlyWiki can be used to set up reference material clipped from Wikipedia (here’s an example). TiddlySpot offers free web hosting for TiddlyWikis.
PMwiki is nice PHP based wiki that stores content in files. It’s fast, easy to use, suitable for use by several people if running on a server (it needs a web server) and, like TiddlyWiki (using a freely downloadable theme), can be made to resemble Wikipedia (using the Monobook skin). PMwiki keeps a log of changes, which can be handy even if nobody else is using the wiki.
Deki Wiki is a sophisticated wiki that uses a MySQL database in addition to a web server. It is something I’m trying out at the moment on an Ubuntu server. Unlike the others, it has WYSIWYG editing which makes it appear quite attractive to use, and it has good page level security . However, I find editing with it a bit of a struggle and it’s a little slow to use.
For me, as yet, there is no perfect wiki. Among other things, I would like to be able to clip web pages with a right-click, and to explore the wiki content using a tag cloud.
In the meantime, the best tool I have for snipping data from the web is OneNote. It’s outstanding, so good I felt a small twinge of regret that it was a Microsoft product not an open source one. (You can try it for free for a couple of months).
Thanks for the great mention of Deki Wiki. We’re working very hard to create great product and I’m glad to hear you like it. Don’t forget you can also edit the wiki page directly using html and dekiscript, which is faster if you are more of a coder than a GUI person. In addition to that there are a total of 3 wysiwyg editors to choose from in the configuration; default editor Xihna and in beta tinymce and fck editor.
Cheers
rion - Director of Sales @ MindTouch