July 5th, 2007
Last night the newly assembled Osmosoft crew attended WikiWednesday - a regular meeting of technologists and business folk who share an interest in matters of all things wiki. These monthly sessions are an opportunity for people to discuss the use of wikis and any issues that surround them, from techie issues to business cases and adoption patterns.
We were lucky enough to be given the opening slot to demonstrate our latest toy - an implementation of TiddlyWiki which leveraged BT’s SDK to initiate phone calls. UnaMesa’s Martin Budden and our own Paul Downey demonstrated what we dubbed ‘Speed Geeking’, a little mashup which interpreted a set of contact details gathered from the WikiWednesday attendees as hCards and then randomly paired up the contacts so that a phone call could be created between each pair. It isn’t typical to hear a speaker at such an event remind the audience to “please keep your phones turned on!”, but that was how this session began. It ended with a room full of people coupled via phone calls, waving at each other across the room as they identified which stranger they had been connected to. Ring-tone chaos!
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July 4th, 2007
I recently commented on the fun I was having repurposing a TiddlyWiki to be the new Osmosoft website. I’m pleased to say that the site is now live.
The fun thing is, that here at Osmosoft we like the open source approach, and that even extends to our website. We invite anyone to offer improvements to the site, and since it is built using TiddlyWiki it is easy for you to grab the code with a quick File > Save As and then you can set about making whatever changes you like, right from within the site. Confused? Well it took me a little while to come to grips with this way of working, and it is becoming apparent that I have just uncovered the tip of the iceberg, but once you get started, this way of working can be really fun and can be very efficient.
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June 27th, 2007
I have used TiddlyWiki, the popular self-contained wiki, before and had even tinkered under the hood a little, but I have never really tried using it in anger. My uses for it until now have been mostly simple tasks such as keeping lists and jottings in central location up in the cloud.
A useful resource, I think, is TiddlySpot, who will host a TiddlyWiki for you and let you access it via your own URL. TiddlySpot also use AJAX to save your changes back to their server. Neat.
In the past I have spent some time tweaking TiddlyWiki’s CSS to customise the look and feel a little, but this has always been fairly shallow exploration.
Since one of the exciting applications of TiddlyWiki is that it can be used as a platform for hosting your website, it seems good sense for us to use it as our own site at Osmosoft. After all, we should ‘eat our own dog food’, right?
With that in mind, today I have been working on restyling a TiddlyWiki in order for it to look and behave like a company website with all the branding considerations that go along with the task. …and I have to say, this is fun!
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