discover fire

Current Homepage: http://jhorman.org/wikidPad/
Created by: Jason Horman
Current project lead: Michael Butscher

Abstract

wikidPad is a desktop wiki. Wikis provide a way to organize and link disparate data into cohesive webs of information. wikidPad picks up the organizational baton where notebooks, index cards, word processing documents, and spreadsheets leave off, yet only requires the user learn a handful of new ideas to operate effectively. I highly recommend it to free-thinkers, creative types, novelists, technical writers, and anyone who needs to organize collections of thoughts and ideas in a logical way.

Synopsis

What was the impetus for beginning use of wikidPad? In 2004 I ran away to Europe and ended up writing a lot in my copious spare time. On my return to the United States, the universe suggested (in the form of an email from my father) that I try writing a novel. Writing a novel required managing many disparate, yet intricately linked, pieces and bits of information. I needed some sort of tool with which to do this management.

With what other programs did I compare it? TiddlyWiki, PhpWiki, TWiki, ZuluPad, Zim, yWriter and Storyweaver.

How technical do you have to be to use wikidPad? Understanding how wikis work is a must. Other than that, I believe the average computer user will have no problem getting into wikidPad.

Who do I believe will benefit the most from using it?

• Anyone who needs to manage sets of interlinking yet inherently different data
• Anyone who needs their information easily accessible
• Anyone who likes to organize their thoughts for posterity.

Do I recommend wikidPad for general use? Yes.

The Details

Novels were, and still are, accepted to be a minimum length of 50,000 words. This translates to between 190 and 240 pages in a word processing document. (Note about the page variance. 50 pages, at a quantity of 50,000 words, really can be gained or lost by careful font choice. Students who need to meet a page length, not a word length, take note: fixed width fonts give you a better page per word count ratio.)

I had yet never written 50,000 words for a single anything, not even for my Senior Essay in college. It would have been smart to have organized things from the get go, but the thrill of writing provided too much instant gratification. I only half-assed looked for organizational tools to help, arrogantly assuming my brain would retain all of the necessary information. 20,000 words into writing (about 80 pages with my font choice) I lost control of the novel. What did the characters do in the previous chapter? Why did Helen bite her nails? Why did James go out with Sharee? What color was that annoying fuzzy cactus next to the couch? How many steps was it to the restroom from the couch? Heck, where was the couch even located in the living room?

No way around it, had to take a break from writing and start organizing. I was committed to finding something that would allow my to organize without requiring much additional overhead or distraction from writing. I had plenty of distractions, many of them extremely tempting already, and I didn’t want organizing my novel to be another one of them.

My problem: I had five main areas of information to organize. These five areas existed nicely inside of their own documents and journals.

However, these documents did not organize well when merged together. They really wanted to exist separately, but for my peace of mind I really wanted to merge them gracefully together. What I really needed was a miniature world wide web just for my novel. I needed the ability to encapsulate and separate important details. I also needed quick access to each piece of information, when I needed it, and have the ability to edit any of the information on the fly. Ideally, I’d have the structure represented below, each document existing independently and still linked together.

I also wanted a million dollars, but decided to leave that off my requirements list. Finding a solution to this problem was proving to be a pain enough.

Looking back on my previous experience organizing large projects, I remembered my success with wiki software. In the past I had used them to collaborate inter-departmental discussions, and I knew something like that would help me organize my novel. A wiki is made up of interlinked documents. The word “wiki” in the scope of this article refers to an entire collection of topics, freely defined by the user of the wiki. Within each wiki are individual documents that represent each topic. Individual documents get linked to each other, exactly the same way as web pages on the internet link to each other. Individual documents can also be edited and formatted, and links between documents can be freely changed. Imagine, if you will, the ability to edit web page you came across on the internet and seeing your changes reflected in real time. That is a simplistic view of a wiki.

For about two weeks I looked for a wiki-like tool that met my needs. At the end of the trial, wikidPad won out and I’ve been using it ever since.

wikidPad is a sub-class of wikis called a desktop wiki. It’s much easier to demonstrate how a desktop wiki works in a video (below) than to describe it only with words. If you do watch the video, please view the movie in full screen by clicking the icon in the lower right of the video viewer, just to the left of the volume control. Watching it in full screen will let you see how things work.

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(An aside. You might still be telling yourself, “I don’t understand this wiki stuff.” Other than the description and the video above, I really can’t do wikis justice within the scope of this article. If you want to read more, I suggest looking at Wikipedia.org and their article on wikis.)

Much like the Google Homepage and their resulting search pages, wikidPad adheres to the very simple design principal of presenting me only what I want, when I want it.

The screenshot above shows the default view of wikidPad. The left hand side of the window displays all of the documents within the wiki. It looks like a traditional folder view, reminiscent of an explorer view available on any windowed operating system. But the actual organization is not a traditional hierarchy. When a document topic is opened (by clicking in the document view window or by clicking a link within the edit window), all additional, directly linked documents appear under the chosen document. This includes circular and recursive linked topics. In my opinion, this is a godsend and allows me to view related documents in a single key stroke.

The edit window takes up the remaining window real estate of wikidPad. Most of the time is spent editing, updating, and linking document content. The advantage wikidPad provides me is that it is a self contained wiki. Most wikis on the web must be edited in an edit-only window that disables navigation between topics. Edits to pages are submitted to the wiki server. The wiki server validates the changes and then publishes the new content for viewing. If you need make even a little change, the edit window must be opened again, and the whole editing process restarted. This makes perfect sense for a public deployment of a wiki, but the number of clicks required for this process is annoyingly cumbersome for a privately used wiki.

The wikidPad edit page isn’t pretty, but it is effective. The moment a link gets created in the edit window, the link is live. If it points to an undefined document, the link is black. If it points to an existing topic, the link is blue. To navigate to the new document, just click the link and you are there. Instant cross-referring of ideas.

wikidPad also has an extremely useful document renaming feature. All documents are referred to by a title, also known as a wiki word. All links to the document must use this wiki word. Let’s say that you’ve created a large wiki with hundreds of links to a “Characters” document. All of a sudden, you have a need to make that document more specific, something like “Characters in my first Novel” but don’t want to change the hundred or so links by hand. Just navigate to the “Characters” document and choose the “Rename Wiki Word” option. The document, and all links to it, will be renamed to “Characters in my first Novel.” Reorganization done.

I’ve never had a need to do this, but wikis are designed to be easily translated into web pages. If you want to export your wiki into static web page pages, you can do so. There is a preview option that works just like “print preview” in word processors. It offers a view of your work translated from wiki notation into HTML.

wikidPad offers three different versions for download: a legacy version, a stable version, and a development version. The development team has been actively working on this project during my three years of usage (a long, long time for an open source product life). They recommend never using the development version with important data, but it always has cooler features than the stable and legacy versions. I don’t guarantee you’ll have the same luck as I’ve had, but I’ve never lost a bit of data using the development releases. The developers deserve commendation for their ongoing delivery of a solid application.

At the time of this writing, I’m using version 1.9 beta 11 of the application. I like the new document structure view and the section collapse/expansion. If you are in the habit of sub-dividing your documents with headings, this feature makes for easy navigation within a single document page.

The timeline view is another feature that has promise. In it’s current state, it only shows what documents were edited on which date. Cool, but not yet useful. I’m hoping that the timeline view eventually grows into a historical view, one that shows what changes were made to documents and when they were made.

Conclusion

wikidPad meets all of my needs, which can be summarized as follows:

• Simple, low overhead user interface
• Easy navigation through my web of wiki-ized ideas
  • No requirement to use CamelCase wiki words
• Self-contained application (ie. no client-server architecture)
• Minimal punishment for re-organizing of documents

I open this Open Source Life series with wikidPad because it’s one of my personal favorites. I look forward to the future of this application, and am curious what wikidPad version 2.0 will provide.