I hate forgetting things, and I love using good tools. I practically live by “if you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen” - except that until recently, I didn’t really do it very well. I’m often opening up a blank text file to make a list of things to do or remember or to spec out some feature to develop or whatever. Naturally, I either then a) forget about the text file on my desktop, or b) need it on a different computer. This often offends my sense of dignity, since there’s clearly got to be a better way of living with computers than doing things like copy files around manually to remember things. I mean, how am I supposed to remember which files should get copied where? Tsk.
I like the idea of a wiki a lot, too. So, when I got around to trying out TiddlyWiki, I immediately saw how useful it would be to me; TiddlyWiki is a one-file wiki. It lives in the browser and lets you edit pages (”Tiddlers”) on your whim as well as tag them and search within them. It saves changes to the file when you tell it to. That definitely ticks the “write it down” and “one file” requirements that I have for this sort of thing. Now, how to make sure it’s always up-to-date where-ever I am?
Enter DropBox. DropBox is a thing that sits in my system tray (on both my Mac and my Windows boxes) and I guess can best be described as subversion for real people (as opposed to developers!). It will push changes to cloud storage whenever you make any, and pull from there to each client when it notices anything happen too. So; dump the TiddlyWiki file into the DropBox (having turned off TW’s “SaveBackups” option, so it doesn’t create a new file each time you make an edit - there’s no point if it’s transparently versioned by DropBox) and install the DropBox client everywhere I go.
Done.
Source: http://blog.neverrunwithscissors.com
