Sunday, February 25, 2007

 

DataPerfect, TiddlyWiki & TiddlyPerfect

It is a while since I have been working on any of my blogs, but a response to this blog from a former DataPerfect user prompted, combined with very exciting developments in the realm of TiddlyPerfect - a hybrid information species that is evolving from a relationship between DataPerfect and TiddlyWiki - has prompted me to post an update.

I had discovered TiddlyWiki - www.tiddlywiki.com - last October, and immediately was enthralled not only with the brilliance of its design, but also with the realization that I was able to generate content / tiddlers for TiddlyWiki pages from my DataPerfect applications.

Through my work with the NGO Committee on Education - www.ngo-education.net - my focus has been on the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014), and one of the principal tasks I had set was to share and make available, for the Committee and the Decade, Information Habitat's extensive archives on sustainable development - much of which is maintained in a set of DataPerfect applications - and TiddlyWiki appears to be an ideal vehicle for this.

TiddlyWiki is a self-contained wiki page, powered by Javascript, that can se set up immediately - it is definitely the wikiest of wikis - wiki being a Hawaiian word that means "swift" or "swiftly".

I had begun using Moodle - Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment - for this purpose, but after a while, had become somewhat frustrated by my inability to generate Moodle pages from DataPerfect. In particular, I had been very disappointed by the limitations of Moodle's wiki module, and had first come across TiddlyWiki from the "Using Moodle" forum.

Since discovering TiddlyWiki, and the opportunities to generate TiddlyWiki content from DataPerfect, almost all of my time has been devoted to developing TiddlyWiki applications, and on December 31, 2006 I registered the domain www.tiddlyperfect.net and launched an initial pre-release initial public offering of TiddlyPerfect.

As of now, I have posted eight TiddlyWiki / TiddlyPerfect sites, including TiddlyPerfect itself:
All of the site are still in a developmental phase, and several other TiddlyPerfect applications are still under development.