Great Things, Small Packages, et al

I’m in love. Geek love. Something struck me, and with its simple and elegant beauty, it’s stolen my heart. And it’s only 300KB. It’s not a book, a movie, or even a game. It’s a wiki.

It’s called TiddlyWiki, and it’s an entire wiki contained in a single HTML file. Conventional wikis, like MediaWiki, which is the basis for Wikipedia, require sprawling multitudes of pages, and requiring a backbone of SQL databases and other such arcane matters, are behemoths. Yet through some hidden means that are not entirely translucent to me, perhaps involving pacts with devils, TiddlyWiki encapsulates all the magic of a full wiki with the ability to run it anywhere. Instead of running on a server, with the attached backbones, it runs anywhere that the HTML file is stored.

When I initially heard of the idea, I thought it was foolish. But when the fancy struck me, mid-D&D session, I began to construct a skeleton wiki with it. Nothing fancy, just a quick timeline article, with articles for the player characters. I began merely fiddling around, hardly diverting myself from playing. By the time the session was over, the wiki was complete. Articles for every named character we’d run in to, and a number of places we’d been. The effect was astounding.

On another topic, I’d like some feedback from you folks, my readers. The first charge is rather serious: I would like some critique of my writing. Even the bad stuff. Just typing it up, it’s style irked me slightly, but I decided to post it as-is. So I want to know y’all’s thoughts. Episodes zero and one are here and here. Comments on the relevant post, please.

See you folks on Monday.