Keep track of your documents and lists with a personal wiki

Posted on January 7th, 2008 by cristian

I’m a big fan of to-do lists - they represent such a simple concept (write things down and don’t try to remember everything) and yet they do so much to keep my life organized. I actually have several to-do lists running at any given time - short term tasks, long term tasks and then a variety of sublists with questions and thoughts to consider on a variety of topics that I may want to investigate in the future.

Ever since I started these lists I knew I’d have to keep track of them in one of the applications I use most often - either my email client or my browser. I did not want to use yet another application just for this purpose.

For a while I tried to manage the lists in Outlook using the built-in Tasks feature. It just wasn’t as flexible as I would have wanted it to be so I eventually turned my attention to my trusted web browser. Could I find a web-based application for this simple purpose?

There are actually plenty of free web-based applications for tracking to-do lists, but most of them follow a hosted model where you’re just allowed to use the application and can’t actually control it. I wanted a web-based app that I could get used to, keep under my control and not worry that the company running it might go away some day.

Around that time I was researching the wiki concept for a work project, and I realized that it was the perfect application for what I needed. A wiki application is software that allows users to easily maintain web pages by putting the focus on the data being published as opposed to the technical details of the method used to publish it. The best example of a wiki is the well-known site Wikipedia. In my case, an added bonus of the wiki concept is that wiki applications are very good at tracking changes made to a document - that was something I was looking for.

I quickly found a nice list of various wiki applications I could choose from and realized that I needed some criteria to allow me to eliminate some of the choices. I just didn’t have the time to try out every single wiki in the list.

This is the criteria I came up with:

Free or open source - why pay for something when there are so many free alternatives to choose from?
Must run on Windows XP - just to eliminate any wiki apps that were specifically meant for Linux
Not based on PHP - I didn’t want to deal with installing and configuring PHP on my desktop
No database backend - many wiki apps use MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server as a database backend but there are also enough of them that save data in plain-text files

With this I was able to quickly eliminate many of the apps on the list above and narrow the list to a more manageable size. Finally, after trying out some of the remaining apps, I found the wiki application that seemed the best fit for my needs:

ScrewTurn Wiki

They offer a Desktop Edition that can easily be installed in Windows XP. It requires that the .NET Framework version 2 be installed, and it will automatically open a browser window where you can download the .NET Framework if it’s not already installed.

Once the installation is complete, you should be able to access the wiki in your browser at the default location - http://localhost:8080/Default.aspx.

You can then proceed to create your first wiki page by clicking on ‘Create a new Page’ in the left menu. It will ask you to login - the default password for admin is ‘password’ (no quotes).