Personal wiki

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A personal wiki is a wiki maintained primarily for personal use. Personal wikis allow people to organize information on their desktop or mobile computing devices in a manner similar to community wikis.

Contents

[edit] Single-user application of multi-user wikis

Most community wikis are designed for concurrent use by multiple users. However, most of these are installable for standalone use as well. This may require installing additional software, for example a web server, a database management system, or a WAMP/LAMP software bundle. Nevertheless, this does not mean the wiki must be accessible to outside users.

Some individuals use password protected wikis running either on their own webservers or hosted by third parties. This has the advantage that the personal space can be accessed from any web browser, at home, at work, on a PDA, at an internet cafe etc. Edits made on one machine are immediately accessible on the others.

[edit] Multi-user wikis with personal editions

[edit] Wikis designed for personal use

ZuluPad Screen Shot, showing links, images, and toolbar

There are also wikis specifically designed for personal use. Their feature set often differs from traditional wikis; examples are:

  • Dynamic tree views of the wiki (These are useful because wikis built for personal usage are often small.)
  • Drag and drop support for images, text and video, mathematics
  • Use of OLE or Linkback to allow wikis to act as relational superstructures for multiple desktop type documents
  • Multimedia embedding, in particular wikis one can link to internal aspects of movies and sound tracks and store notes / comments
  • Macros and macros constructors. Also often support for alien macros so the wiki can act as a multi scripting macro system

[edit] Personal Wikis

[edit] Free

  • bLADEWiki is a free personal wiki written in C#. It is composed of two distinct programs, one for Windows and the other for Windows mobile, with robust syncing between the two.
  • DidiWiki is a free small and simple personal wiki written in C. (appears no longer active)
  • MoinMoin Desktop Edition is a browser-based wiki with a built-in server based on the python-powered MoinMoin original version.
  • Nanoki is a small, full featured wiki engine implemented in Lua.
  • Notebook is a freeware Tcl/Tk application. It runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Exports to HTML and MediaWiki markup.[1]
  • Personal PPC Wiki is a free personal wiki written in Basic4PPC.
  • Pimki is a derivative of Instiki designed as a personal information manager.
  • TiddlyWiki is BSD license, single file, self-modifiying HTML + JavaScript based personal wiki
  • Tomboy is a (LGPL) free software program for note-taking in a Wiki like manner. Simple editing and retrieval methods are provided. The program allows for easy organisation of any hierarchical data. The Tomboy project is hosted on GNOME CVS.
WikidPad Screen shot
  • Wiki on a Stick (WoaS) is a free (GPL) single file, html based personal wiki system with support for IE, Firefox, and Opera
  • Wiki in a jar Wiki in a Jar is a small (one jar file, <100KB) Java Wiki implementation with great focus on simplicity.
  • WikidPad is a free open-source standalone wiki notebook/outliner for Windows with many features, such as dynamic tree generation, topic tagging, auto-completion, full text searches, visual link tree, customizable interface, image and file control etc.
  • WikiNotes is an open source personal wiki for Mac OS X similar to VoodooPad.
  • WikkaWiki is a flexible, standards-compliant and lightweight wiki engine written in PHP, which uses MySQL to store pages. Forked from WakkaWiki. Designed for speed, extensibility, and security. Released under the GPL license.
  • Zim is a (GPL) free software program intended as personal scratch book and note-taking application.
  • ZuluPad is a personal wiki designed for Windows and Mac OS X platforms [2]. This product is available in both an opensource and a for-purchase version.

[edit] Commercial

ConnectedText showing a treeview of the linking between pages
  • ArtificialMemory is a Web-based personal semantic wiki system
  • ConnectedText is a commercial Windows-based personal wiki system with many advanced features, including: full text searches, visual link tree, customizable interface, image and file control, CSS-based page display, exports to HTML and HTML Help, and plug-ins.
  • Gazette is a small, portable, personal wiki for Windows XP and greater. Noteworthy features include: quick page jumping, easy browser-like navigation, viewing remote gzx documents, in-built gzx document compiler.
  • LinkedNotes is a Windows .NET 2.0 implementation of a personal wiki. Basic page formatting and linking by page name is provided. The program will run from a USB flash drive. User authentication and encryption ensure private information is kept safe.
  • Luminotes is a WYSIWYG personal wiki notebook for organizing thoughts and ideas. Both free and paid versions are available.
  • PersonalBrain is a Java based associative database, where associated ideas are clustered in dynamic proximity, similar to ConnectedText (shown at left).
  • RubberSquid is a commercial personal wiki designed for mobile phone and PDAs. It uses natural language processing to deliver focused page summaries as well as answer questions and relevance rank responses.
  • StoneNotes is a Windows based personal wiki system. StoneNotes provides a free demo which is not time limited.
  • Trunk is a personal wiki which runs on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It uses the Markdown formatting syntax and supports editing in a browser using the mobile device as a web server.
  • MobileWIkiServer is a iPhone Wiki for personal use, but also serves pages to other clients in a WiFi network.
  • VoodooPad written by Flying Meat essentially invented the modern personal/desktop wikis [3] and earned high praise early in its lifespan [4], designed for the Mac OS X platform. The current versions supports innovations such as: full web export, saved workspaces (between session memory), page synchronization (via MobileMe), tabs, tags, automatic indention. There is a free lite version.
  • WhizFolders is a Windows based personal wiki system. Many ways to quickly insert links between notes is provided.
  • WindowsWiki A shareware personal wiki for students and business travelers. WindowsWiki has a few details.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Some Idiosyncratic Reflections on Note-Taking in General and ConnectedText in Particular" by Manfred Kuehn "Will Duquette's Notebook ... was a large improvement over Wikit, and ConnectedText ... was a definite improvement over ... Notebook"
  2. ^ ZuluPad for Windows and Mac OS X
  3. ^ Gus Mueller Interview
  4. ^ 2003 Innovations award

[edit] External links

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