Gets me all tingly..

Most of your programmer time during a project is spent researching, making decisions and then scrapping all those decisions for some good reason or another. For every project i've worked on, i've usually kept some sort of daily linear journal in electronic form that describes issues / concepts / decisions about a given research / problem and describes the results. These types of logs are massively important for a number of reasons, the most dominant being the ability to correlate information so that I can walk back through niche ideas that may have been discarded for prior constraints, but may now be applicable. I also can store information for specific decisions (ie "we chose 256 as a texture size due to disk read speed on an XBOX360, here's the stats:" ).

Prior forms of this used GoogleDocs but as the amount of information grew, it became massively difficult to actually manage the dataset over time, especially if you wanted to find everything related to "terrain."

I've been doing consulting for a company that goes somewhat overboard with their online wiki process to describe code changes. Effectively any change must be discussed, validated, added to the wiki, discussed again, and then done. Now, in particular, that's overkill, but it did spark a light in my head about how a custom wiki would help me keep track of my daily journals much better than google docs.

So I set off in search of a way to get access to a free wiki to install on my webserver. Unfortintally, most of the wikis require Apache, or Ruby etc etc, which my webserver doesn't do for me at the current cost per month.

And then i stumbled across one of the coolest things I'd seen: TiddlyWiki. The entire wiki itself is contained in a single .html file, so it's easy to keep track of, move, or carry around with you on a USB stick. Apparently I'm a little late to the party, as it was voted one of the "best tools of 2007."

In addition to that, it seems that quite a few number of people have decided to script / modify the system with some rather cool results:
TiddlyWiki FTRUS : A simply wiki skin designed for ease of use
TiddlyThemes: a massive site divoted to custom skins of tiddlys
TiddlyDesktop: Control content via movable windows in your browser.
LATEX: Add mathmatical symbols to your wiki entries
Wiki On A Stick : A much more slimmed down, notes based version of things. By far the most bare-bones version of this type of thing.
TiddlyBackpack : is a nicely slimmed down and cleaner version of things.

If you like keeping these types of data logs, or you think it might be up your alley, then i highly suggest looking at this tool.

~Main