Wiki fever

This’ll be short, because I somehow keep running out of time (this isn’t supposed to happen! I was supposed to have gobs and gobs of free time after graduating, but I’m busier now than I was during crunch time! Something has gone horribly awry in the universe — somebody might want to see if anything’s been stirred up at Area 51…).

I’ve been using Backpack to keep track of my to-do lists, and recently I ran across RememberTheMilk.com, which has a nice interface, but today I came across what I think will end up being the best solution, at least for me: a wiki.

Now, I really ought to have thought of this before, and I did in a genealogy research context (see my Beyond blog, which I really need to get around to updating…), but not in a general productivity sense. Backpack has been good to me, but (1) it can get kind of slow sometimes at updating the to-do items and (2) I need unlimited pages. :)

Wikis are perfect for this, because they’re pretty much lightning fast (it’s just text — I don’t use the fancy GUI editors, but instead prefer to go under the skin), and you usually get unlimited pages, and you can add in other stuff (images, for example) as necessary. True, you no longer get clickable to-do items — instead using bullets in a list — but that’s okay.

So, I started up a new wiki for myself at PBwiki.com, and it’s going well so far. Eventually I think I’ll install one on my own server (I have two for other purposes, using MediaWiki) so I can control everything that I need to, but for now this’ll do. It’s quite exciting — I can pull in all my writings, for example, and link directly to them with minimum effort and maximum speed. (I had thought about doing that in Google Docs, but it’s slower and linking is harder.)

In fact, “quite exciting” doesn’t do it justice. I’ve been daydreaming about this all day, getting goosebumps as I contemplate organizing my whole life into a wiki. I’ll have to come up with a name for it, of course — something good, something that’ll make me tingle every time I say it to myself. And edit it religiously. And…and…and…

Yes, I have wiki fever. And it’ll probably only get worse. ;)

Another friend of mine has a Wiki and he reacts the same way you do…odd. ;)

LOL :) It’s been a few days now and I’m still in heaven. It’s perfect for me, especially because (1) text doesn’t take up much room, which is great since I tend to write a lot :) and (2) hyperlinks. Mmm. :)

Take a look at TiddlyWiki http://www.tiddlywiki.com
I use that for my personal organization needs, since I can keep it on my USB stick (doesn’t need a server)

– Steven

Steven: Thanks!

Yes. Wiki’s are great for genealogy. Have you heard of http://www.werelate.org. It is one of the best there is.

[…] I’ve switched over to using a wiki for my productivity needs (to-do lists, research notes, etc.), and I’m more and more convinced that it’s perfect for genealogy research. It’s freeform, laughably easy to store, and the hyperlinks make it a piece of cake to stitch things together where needed (and when you think about it, researching genealogy is just that: you stitch evidence together to form people and then stitch them together to form families and lines). And wikis are collaborative, and most support revisioning. […]