Third Shelf

In the excellent book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware (Pragmatic Programmers) by Andy Hunt, he suggests that every programmer should have a personal wiki in order to manage knowledge effectively. A sort of exocortex. A place where you can keep ideas, thoughts and nearly anything you want outside your brain.

Ever received one of those emails that you just have to keep somewhere? That snippet of source code that might come in handy? That chocolate muffin recipe? Why not put all of it into your wiki?

My personal choice of this kind of wiki is TiddlyWiki. Simply because all of the content is in a single HTML file. Fan of Getting Things Done? TiddlyWiki can easily be configured to support the Getting Things Done methodology. Have a look at d-cubed for example.

Bear in mind that it has a learning curve to it, but if you are willing to stick to it you will surely reap the benefits.

Some of the features include:

• Tagging
• Searching
• Text formatting, including support for monospace
• Highlighting
• Block quotes
• Tables
• Headers
• Save with backups
• RSS feeds

I would suggest the following plugins to really spice-up TiddlyWiki:

• YourSearch
• CheckBox
• AttachFile
• Calendar

Check out TiddlyTools and TiddlyVault for other plugins. It supports themes, which can be downloaded from TiddlyThemes. There is also a great cheat sheat available.