News You Can Bruise for 2009 March 14

My biggest current project is a large work of fiction that you should be able to see in a couple of months. I've been writing down notes for months, scribbled in notebooks and put in disorganized files on my hard drive. I've also been collecting ideas from friends in email. Now that I need to exploit those notes, the limitations of this system become apparent.

I'm here to tell you that TiddlyWiki is the solution. I spent most of today organizing my notes, and the story is correspondingly clearer in my head. Tiny ideas have a place to live, and I've got a workshop for developing them into fleshed-out ideas.

Tiddlywiki lowers the barriers to capturing a fleeting idea better than any other software I've used. Since it's a Javascript app that runs in the web browser, rather than a client-server thing, Tiddlywiki is fast. Since it displays your entire edit trail on one page, the snippets don't feel isolated from each other. I can split out a section that's getting too long without losing it.

I've known about Tiddlywiki for a long time, and it's not that I resisted trying it until now; rather, I never really needed it until now. It delivers.