Personal wiki
Personal wikis allow people to richly link information on their desktop or mobile computing devices the same way a community wiki links information across the internet. Thus people who like the wiki philosophy of organizing information may find personal wikis useful.
Single-user application of multi-user wikis
Many wikis are designed for concurrent use by multiple users. However, given sufficient skill and motivation, an individual user can install and run any of them for personal use. This may require installing additional software, for example a Web server, a DBMS, or a WAMP or LAMP software bundle. The user can prevent access to the wiki from outside the local computer.
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.
Multi-user wikis with personal editions
- MoinMoin is a Wiki clone written in Python.
- ScrewTurn Wiki is written in C# and based on the ASP.NET 2.0 platform.
- TWiki has a newly developing desktop version
Wikis designed for personal use
There are also wikis specifically for personal use. The main advantage they offer currently is drag and drop support for images, text and video.
Two example products are VoodooPad (Mac) and StoneNotes (Windows).
VoodooPad
VoodooPad is a personal wiki designed by a company called flyingmeat for the Mac OS X platform.[1] This product also has a free "lite" version. flyingmeat also make a lightweight wiki server available for use with VoodooPad. The screen shot to the right demonstrates some aspects of the usage. The diagrams are gifs "drag and dropped" from the online version of SICP. The blue text are hyperlinks to within the book, the menu to the right contains a full list of pages which are all live links.
ZuluPad
ZuluPad is a personal wiki designed by Tom Gersic for Windows and Mac OS X platforms.[2] This product is available in both an opensource and a for-purchase version. Some features include automatic linking of wiki words, automatic linking of URLs, exporting of HTML files, and syncing files to a central server with web-access.
StoneNotes
StoneNotes is a Windows based personal wiki system. StoneNote's core concept is an intuitive linking interface: simply double click any word to create a new note with that title and link to it. StoneNotes provides a free demo which is not time limited.
ConnectedText
ConnectedText is a Windows-based non-free personal wiki system with many advanced features, including: full text searches, visual link tree, customizable interface, image and file control, CSS-based page display, and plug-ins. The author provides a 30 day trial demo.
Other personal wikis
- Notebook is a freeware tcl/tk application. It runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Exports to HTML and MediaWiki markup.
- TiddlyWiki is also 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. Tomboy is stored in the Gnome CVS
- WikidPad is an open-source standalone wiki notebook/outliner for Windows with plenty of features, such as dynamic tree generation, topic tagging, auto-completion, etc.
- Zim is a GPL / Artistic free software desktop wiki. All pages are stored as simple text files.
- Newton is a GPL / Artistic free software desktop wiki.