philwilson.org

Screenshot of ripplerap in action

I use a different note-taking tool for almost every conference I attend. I try and use ones which have both off- and on-line components for allowing me to write if there’s no connectivity but allowing me to publish easily if there is.

At FOWA 2008, after discovering it shortly before OpenTech and then talking to the Osmosoft guys about it, I used RippleRap.

So, some basics:

TiddlyWiki “is a single html file which has all the characteristics of a wiki” - you save it to your computer, open it in your browser, and it all still works. It’s open source and supports plugins, of which there seem to be hundreds. There’s a great interview by O’ReillyGMT with its’ creator Jeremy Ruston here. Excellent stuff.

RippleRap is a note-sharing tool based on TiddlyWiki. It comes with a particular set of plugins and a server-side component which handles the uploading and sharing of your wiki pages (called Tiddlers).

Confabb is a hosted RippleRap server component. You sign up, go to the page for your conference, download the pre-configured and pre-populated conference RippleRap and start making your notes which are then synced to the website. Here is the confabb for FOWA 2008.

The summary: TiddlyWiki and RippleRap are great, Confabb is not.

A bit more detail:

The good: offline editing in a web interface suits me down to the ground. TiddlyWiki is very easy to use, and with a pre-populated schedule it makes adding new content a breeze.

The bad: syncing with confabb just didn’t work. TiddlyWiki doesn’t support Textile (which I have hardwired into my brain) or other humane markups like Markdown. Also the sidebar of schedule was really long, so as the day went on you had scroll to bottom, find your talk, click its title and scroll back to the top before you could start writing notes. Very annoying indeed.

In the future I wouldn’t use Confabb - its server-side component seems pretty rubbish although the custom conference TiddlyWiki was great (it would have been even better with presenter bios and links from the conference website!).

If I want to try TiddlyWiki and RippleRap at a conference again I’ll either host my own TiddlyWiki server (this is apparently not entirely straightforward) or use one of the solutions mentioned on TiddlyWiki for the rest of us.

As an aside, after Kathy Sierra’s excellent talk (no video, boooo) it turned out that serendipitously I’d been sitting next to Osmosofter Phil Whitehouse, who’d watched me using TiddlyWiki and we had a productive chat about it before Diggnation Live started. We’d actually met before at OpenTech when I showed how him how to upload new apps to the BUG using Eclipse, but we’d both forgotten!

Because it’s on the web so I never go there to actually look for stuff, and it’s not built into my normal search

Where’s the “search my shit” button that searches delicious and twitter and flickr and my wiki and my IM conversations for that one link I added or sent three months ago?

Practically, the reason Tomboy is so useful is because it’s so local. Local to my PC and local to my brain because it comes up with a simple key-combo and lets me either start typing, searching or opening notes. It’s the shizzle. Which is why it going cross-platform for 0.12 is awesome.

What do I do in the meantime? I really like the look and feel of Tudumo but I don’t really need a GTD app, my GTD is sorted by index cards, I just need somewhere to dump notes every now and again before my brain explodes.

It seems vaguely ironic, although possibly in an Alanis Morissette way, that as people become happier to use and more reliant on using the cloud (including me), my demands on my local applications have gone way, way up.

That is to say, the value of the cloud to me is the network (that is to say, the people), plus it has some vaguely nice tools, but where all that data is most useful to me is on my local PC.

Loads of people in my office have a Wii. Being British, this is a terribly amusing state of affairs.

I was considering setting up a space on our work wiki where we could jot down our friend codes, games we’ve got, would recommend, release schedules, etc. (or just link to external resources - the world always needs another clearing-house, right?) when it struck me that Facebook might be an alternative - it would be easier to open to other people (although harder to regulate the scummy masses) and easier to post information.

The problem is that I just don’t like using Facebook. There’s something terribly clumsy about its interface which really turns me off. I can never quite find where I’m supposed to be going at a particular time, and the way groups are formatted is just a bit, well, shit. There’s the Wall for conversations, but also the discussion boards, and it’s just a mess, especially with no way of checking what’s going on without putting some dedicated effort into visiting all the time. I thought we left that behind the best part of a decade ago.

So I’d like to use a wiki and integrate our forums, but our forums are, uh, well, “not available” is pretty accurate. I guess I’ll plough through the Confluence plugins and see what I can do.

There is little wiki syntax interoperability. In fact, it’s so bad that there are dedicated libraries for converting between almost every wiki system, the best probably being a Perl library called HTML::WikiConverter which also has an online demo and can covert HTML to sixteen different syntaxes. Sixteen!

There have been several efforts over the years to come up with a common syntax, and they’ve all petered out. The latest is called Creole and at their last workshop Ward Cunningham was on the Panel. In their own words:

Creole is a common wiki markup language to be used across different Wikis. It’s not replacing existing markup but instead enabling wiki users to transfer content seamlessly across wikis, and for novice users to contribute more easily.

They also have a reasonably impressive list of wiki engines with plugins for supporting this interchange syntax

You can see the wiki syntax they propose in the latest version of the spec (0.4 at the time of writing).

It’s not too bad so long as you can read words mixed between five vertical bars [[a bit|like this]] [[and|then]] [[maybe something|like this]]. It’s obviously to maintain the “all formatting is double-character” and to allow people to keep putting things in square brackets. Which of course they do all the time. Or, in the several thousand wiki pages I’ve seen, twice.

At least it doesn’t use MediaWiki’s markup for italics and bold. Visual clutter is crap.