TiddlyWiki Testimonials/Use cases

[Devin Weaver]

** Permission granted to edit, republish, and/or quote with attribution: Devin Weaver / @sukima) / suki (at) tritarget.org

I thought these were interesting use cases and wanted to share. I think the TiddlyWiki community is the few communities that would understand these particular edge cases.

Information hub for elderly care

My grandmother is in her late 90's. To help make things easier I set up a TiddlyWiki file in her Dropbox. The folder is shared to my own Dropbox account and the same file is set to her browser's homepage. Now I can edit the TiddlyWiki from my personal computer and it will sync to her machine. I store her favorite websites as icons she can click on plus a list of medications and instructions on how to access her email.

This has helped our family immensely as all her medical needs are easily referable and indexed. It has allowed her home aids to access notes and instructions for her care. And it is all easily printable.

When all else fails

I use TiddlyWiki to build my personal homepage/blog (tritarget.org). I save the source in a git repository and run the Node.JS command to build a single index.html file which I upload to my hosted webserver. I recently visited family in a rural area. I had forgotten my laptop charger and it was dead. Left to work on a 10 year old computer I wanted to edit my homepage. Normally I would remote connect to a personal server which would allow my to run the Node.JS command but its CPU fan broke and was offline. I had a choice to either attempt to build a temporary development environment on Amazon EC2 or try to build one on my family member's ancient computer which was an old mac. I attempted the latter thinking it would be easier to install Node.JS on the old mac then on some random cloud service. I quickly found that didn't work because Git (the software I use to download the source code) would crash.

Then I realized that the site was a TiddlyWiki and I don't need such fancy things. I simply went to the website and clicked download (save). With a fully working copy in the download folder I made my updates to the site and simply emailed the updated HTML file to myself. Now, when I get home and charge my laptop a simple drag and drop and the website gets a new blog post. You can't do that with a normal web app these days!