Welcome to TiddlyWiki! This first chapter will help you get your bearings. At the end of it, you will have a fully functional and useful sample wiki; it just won't take advantage of many of the features that make TiddlyWiki special.

The chapter has three phases:

1. First, we'll set up a sample wiki for use in the rest of the book, by installing TiddlyWiki, downloading a copy of this book, exploring the TiddlyWiki interface, and tweaking settings.
2. Second, we'll learn about five basic concepts in TiddlyWiki: tiddlers, fields, wikitext, links, and tags.
3. Last, we'll go through a seven-section tutorial to set up the basic structure of the sample wiki, gathering requirements, outlining the structure of the wiki, and then creating journal entries, contacts, meeting notes, projects, and miscellaneous notes in accordance with the requirements and structure. Along the way, you'll learn how to navigate TiddlyWiki's interface, use the basic features of wikitext, and model data in TiddlyWiki.

This chapter will be unusual in that it will include few exercises. Instead, you'll be working nonstop in your sample wiki as you read. Once we move into chapter 2, we'll switch to discussing some concepts and then turning you loose to try them out on your own.

If you haven't yet read How to Use This Book or watched the video tour there, you may wish to do so now. If you're feeling impatient, you can figure out how it works as you go along and return to that section later if needed.

In this chapter

• Installing TiddlyWiki – How to get TiddlyWiki set up on your computer.
• Downloading Grok TiddlyWiki – How to make a copy of this book so you can save your progress.
• The TiddlyWiki Interface – Study an annotated screenshot of TiddlyWiki's interface to help you put names to what you're seeing.
• Tweaking Your Settings – A quick look at some of the TiddlyWiki options you're most likely to want to change.
• Tiddlers – Tiddlers are the unit of information in TiddlyWiki.
• Fields – Tiddlers are made up of fields.
• Wikitext – Wikitext is a markup language used to format tiddlers.
• Links – Links tell TiddlyWiki what ideas (tiddlers) in your wiki are related to each other.
• Tags – Tags are a special type of link used to categorize tiddlers and arrange them in hierarchies.
• Requirements for the Sample Wiki – What do we want the example wiki we're building in this book to be able to do?
• Structuring Our Wiki – How to translate what we want the wiki to do into TiddlyWiki concepts.
• Journal Tiddlers – How to create journal tiddlers and use basic wikitext formatting features.
• Contact Tiddlers – How to track the people we meet at work, linking to the ideas they're involved in and modeling their attributes as discrete fields of information.
• Meeting Tiddlers – How to take notes on meetings, excising existing notes and using TiddlyWiki's timestamp format to identify when the meeting happened.
• Project Tiddlers – How to organize meetings and knowledge into overarching projects.
• Knowledge Tiddlers – How to organize information that doesn't fall into a clear category, and why such information should be pulled out into separate units of information and related to others.
• Reviewing the Basics – Some final exercises to help you practice the basics.