The Twine application has been around for about 15 years and it’s primary purpose is to allow writers to create online Interactive Fiction.
The program comes with its own IDE for creating stories and can be installed on Windows, Mac and Linux systems.
Users can also create stories directly inside their browser of choice, but, doing so saves stories in that browser only. If you are going to do browser editing then make sure to Publish your stories regularly to create backups.
Since I used another web app, TiddlyWiki, for several years to create references and manage my daily workflow at work, after I found Twine, I became interested in how it could be used for online reference materials. Unlike TiddlyWiki, once published, those Twine files are not editable by people viewing the files. However, using Twine to create searchable reference materials turns out to be quite doable.
I have created four references so far. One called Bible Promises, one called Concise Christianity and two Bible ones (Whole Bible and New Testament).
Below are some screenshots from Bible Promises and general instructions on how to use it.
The Bible Promises app using several formatting techniques like buttons, headers, HTML Details/Summary to show a list with pop open sub lists. The only programming code required is for the footer display and the text/topic searches. It is relatively fast performing searches.
Below are some screenshots from Concise Christianity.
I used different background colors based on which group the topics (articles) are accessed from. The programming code was mostly for Bible text searching.
Creating these types of resources in Twine involves lots of working with text and some ability to understand formatting through HTML and CSS commands. Twine’s Harlowe story format also uses numerous commands to format text and perform various actions.
I have been working with Twine for about a month now and will be creating additional references as I find interesting subject matter.
The Twine IDE (editor) looks like this:
The programming code for the text search is here. It does take some learning.
The Twine software is found here
The Bible Promises app is here
The Concise Christianity app is here
The New Testament app is here
The Whole Bible app is here
I hope you will find a use for these applications as well as using Twine to create your own reference materials and/or Interactive Fiction books.