A step-up from TiddlyWiki that is still 100% portable?

Question

TiddlyWiki is a great idea, brilliantly implemented. I'm using it as a portable personal "knowledge manager," and these are the prize virtues:

1. It travels on my USB flash memory stick and runs on any computer, regardless of operating system
2. No software installation is needed on the computer (TiddlyWiki merely uses the Internet browser)
3. No Internet connection is needed
4. In terms of data retrieval functionality, it mimics a relational database (use of tags and internal links)

Let's say I've got a million words of prose in 4,000 tiddlers (posts). I'm still testing, but it looks like TiddlyWiki gets very slow.

Is there an app like TiddlyWiki that keeps all the virtues I listed above, and allows more storage? (or rather, retrieval!)

NOTE: Separation of content and presentation would be ideal. It's nifty that TiddlyWiki has everything in a single HTML document, but it's unhelpful in many ways. I don't care if a directory of assorted docs is needed (SQLite, XML?), as long as it's functionally self-contained.

Answer 1

You could try installing Portable Apps on your USB drive and adding the XAMPP Package which has Apache, PHP, MySQL all installed and running MediaWiki or other Wiki software on top of it.

Answer 2

Before creating Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson wrote a wiki app called Instiki. Like TiddlyWiki, you don't run it from a separately running server*, so it's easy to run locally and move around on a USB drive (exporting the entire content to a zip file with all the html files or all the files in Textile markup). The entire Instiki tgz download is less than 5mb and the app has only one external dependency: Ruby.

So you can run Instiki anywhere you can run Ruby (for instance, on a Nokia N900 phone).

I never built any Instiki sites as large as you describe, but it ought to handle 1 million words in 4,000 pages a lot easier than TiddlyWiki handles 4,000 tiddlers.

Roger_S

* Oh, not to confuse anyone: Instiki uses the embedded webserver WEBrick

Answer 3

After some time and serious consideration, I will post my own answer.
There is nothing that matches TiddlyWiki, especially if you add a criterion #5:

Set up and configuration are so simple as to be almost zero. This would also mean dependencies are so minimal as to be transparent, or nearly so.

As for voluminous information, TW can pretty much handle it. (My early discouragements were due to malformed code.) Difficulty accessing information through the interface becomes an issue before any speed problems. This isn't to fault the interface -- it could be more powerful, but that would sacrifice lightness.

Obviously my question could have been better -- sorry about that. I'm not trying to be self-serving here; it's just that if I were a seeker after this information, this is the answer I would want to find. Until a better one comes, of course.

Answer 4

http://tiddlyweb.peermore.com/wiki/ maybe exactly what you are looking for.

You can use any TiddlyWiki variant and the data can be delivered via a server and on-demand.

Answer 5

I have recently discovered DokuWikiStick which runs a version of MicroApache. Recommended by LifeHacker... Starting size is about 10MB.