What is it?

TiddlyWiki is an open source software invented by Jeremy Ruston at BT Osmosoft. We acknowledge the kind and friendly support we have had from our open collaboration with BT Osmosoft, including Jeremy Ruston and his team, the extremely helpful open source community which you can find via the link or via https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/tiddlywiki). We also acknowledge Jonathon Lister and Joshua Bradley, who have been the technical wizards behind the development of the new 'ambit theme'.

No, but what IS it?!

Tiddlywiki are documents, but they don't work like paper. They look (superficially) very similar to other websites - you "read" them in a browser, such as Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, or Internet Explorer (old versions of IE are not so good at handling them).

By clicking on HighlightedWords these function as Links, which instantly open a separate Tiddler.

What you are reading right now is called a Tiddler.

In a tiddlywiki, instead of a link opening a whole new web-page, however, it just opens a new 'note' inside the existing page - think of individual Tiddlers as paragraphs if you like, or 'post-it notes', or 'Thoughts', which can be collected together and sorted quickly and easily in lots of different ways. Each tiddler can be opened, looked at, closed, a bit like having immediate access to lots of sheets of paper which you can pull out and file away again at the click of a mouse...

The basic architecture of the manual is a large number of these (more or less) brief Tiddlers - each of which is connected to other Tiddlers - via two kinds of 'connectors':

• Links, as described above, which directly open another tiddler on your desktop (see it listed at the bottom of your Currently Open list.)
• Tags - which link up the content of different tiddlers as sub-topics under a topic heading (for instance this tiddler is tagged as one of a set that describe what a practitioner needs to know about Using the Manual.)

Tags offer an important way of integrating different levels and areas of information, which a conventional (linear) book format would struggle to do. A single Tiddler can easily be tagged with multiple tags - so it is a great way to cross-reference pieces of data.

I am a techie, what IS IT?!

It is a single html file, that uses javascript and CSS tricks to use the standard web-brower as a platform for editing and saving the self-contained wiki. Within the single html file, you find tiddlers that are effectively acting as the 'software' that define the behaviour of the wiki, and others that contain the content.

TiddlySpace offers a serverside environment to host multiple tiddlywikis, that have public and private tiddlers, and which allows the public content of one individually-curated wiki to be included within another wiki.

For more information on this wonderful free software resource see www.tiddlywiki.com. To understand how to get the best out of it, see the content tagged as Understanding TiddlyManual format.