StoryMachine, meet TiddlyWiki

Last weekend's Helen Keller Day activities had the effect of raising StoryMachine from the proverbial grave where it has maundered for some time. StoryMachine chats text and rezzes nodes from a story supplied in a notecard. I modified it so that it chatted node names and links as they were rezzed. The voice applet used by the VHH group (responsible for Max the virtual guidedog) runs in parallel with the SL client and speaks chat as it is added to the log (chat logging must be enabled for it to work).

Discussions on the SLED list suggested that there was still some interest in 3D wikis, building off from Eloise Pasteur's venerable (but still useful) spidergram. One thing I was interested in was "flattening" the 3D wiki of StoryMachine so it could be available on the 2D web. Some time ago I played with TiddlyWiki, a single-user wiki where the software (in Javascript) and content are located in the same HTML file. I have modified StoryMachine so the node menu can chat codes for the TiddlyWiki chunks (so-called tiddlers). At the moment the user has to paste this code into the TiddlyWiki HTML file but it should not be difficult to automate the process.

The result is a wiki that runs on a prim and that can also be browsed and searched in the SL client (though hyperlinks out of TiddlyWiki sadly don't work and, indeed, crashed the client when I attempted to open an external browser). As the closeup below shows, links can be preserved (click the image for a larger version). TiddlyWiki also has the concept of permaviews that enables specific tiddlers to be displayed. This to some extent gets round the problems of scrolling being deficient on prims. Tiddlers are normally fairly small and will often display on a single page without scrolling.


Limitations? At the moment the process isn't automated and images are not supported, just text names and plain text notecards (including traditional wiki-style formatting). Text lines in notecards must be less than 255 characters or the line is truncated. While I'm trying to facilitate dynamic rezzing of nodes (using the blue buttons in the bottom left of the top image), the linking model for those differs from that used by standard nodes and isn't factored in yet. Having said that, export as tiddlers does at least provide a version that might incorporate dynamic node reuse and modification. Finally, at present there is no roundtrip possible, i.e. no way of getting tiddlers back into StoryMachine. While it is feasible, the inability to write to notecards means that a web database solution is preferable to much tedious cut-and pasting.

I think StoryMachine's tortuous development history and general user hostility makes it less than ideal for student use at present but the concept of using TiddlyWiki as an adjunct is, I think, worth bearing in mind for other projects.