the tiddlyspot blog

THIS BLOG NOW DEFUNCT - New blog at http://tiddlyspot.blogspot.com

Simon — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 00:46:05 +0000

Like the subject says. Please update your rss feeds and bookmarks. Once again the new url:

http://tiddlyspot.blogspot.com/

Why? Wordpress giving too much pain. Blogger very nice, especially new beta version. Will keep this one here to preserve the content but all new stuff will be at the new location.

Stats page is back!

Simon — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 05:02:08 +0000

Sorry about the long wait. It was actually much easier to bring back than I thought initially. The tracker image is doing its job pretty well. Some day the stats stuff will need to be rewritten for efficiency and scalability. But for now I’m happy that it’s back. It’s a hack but a good one. Here’s a little screen shot:

If you want to see how many hits your site is getting go to your control panel (eg http://yoursite.tiddlyspot.com/controlpanel) and click on the “Hit counter” link.

Default value of public listing okay is now ‘true’

Simon — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 04:49:39 +0000

This effects new sites. For existing sites that have it set to false it will remain false. We often find wonderful sites that judging by the content are clearly meant to be public but the site’s owner hasn’t clicked the “public listing okay” so we can’t share them with you all. I’m pretty sure in 99% of these case the site owner just didn’t get around to visiting the control panel and ticking that box it, so that’s the reasoning behind this change.

Spammers really take the fun out of wordpress

Simon — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 03:59:07 +0000

I switched on this thing called Akismet which might make life easier. If it doesn’t I think I will pack up and move to blogspot. Meanwhile here are some things that we should be doing next:

Upgrade to the latest TW. (I think we are one point release behind)
Let people remove their own sites. (Are you really sure? Are really truly sure you’re sure?)
Make ts sites “clean”. By that I mean stop doing that sneaky/lazy little hack to put the upload button in the the SidebarOptions shadow tiddler and the password box in options because it dissappears when you upgrade your TW code.
Restore the stats page. I think I can do it now with the tracking gif.
Fix up our site reports. Our old ones are too slow now since we have 6000 or so sites. I am currently counting sites using ls -l | wc -l..
Learn about fastcgi and how we might use it to reduce load (someday maybe?)

Update:

Well Akismet is doing a pretty good job so far, thank goodness. And I thought of another one, probably ahead of all the rest:

Make an “I forgot my password” page. To make this effective we would probably have to ask for an email address at sign up.

Site #5000 any moment now

Simon — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 10:21:46 +0000

Literally right this second there are 4999 tiddlyspot sites. The next in is the big five triple oh. I think perhap we should award some kind of prize (or should we save that for the 1,000,000th site?).

NaNoWriMo

Simon — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 05:55:13 +0000

I don’t know a lot about NaNoWriMo (which stands for National Novel Writing Month) but a few of the NaNoWriMo people are using TiddlyWiki and Tiddlyspot. Welcome aboard NaNoWriMo folks. See the discussion here.

Featured sites

Simon — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 05:58:13 +0000

Here’s a few interesting tiddlyspot sites:

Some time in the near future we will be featuring some of the best tiddlyspot sites on the tiddlyspot home page. If you have a pretty good site that you don’t mind sharing then don’t forget to tick “allow public listing” in your control panel.

Also, just a note, if you click “allow public listing” make sure you untick “restrict access” otherwise no one can see your site anyway.

Update:

I had messed up some of the links above. Should be fixed now.

Simon — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 05:14:43 +0000

I know it’s not a fun subject but to help cover our hosting costs we have some plans to place ads in tiddlyspot sites. They will be text only google ads and we will do our best not to annoy you too much. Think gmail (unobtrusive, context sensitive) rather than old-school geocities (dreadful flashing “claim your prize!!!” banners).

In the near future we will be looking for volunteers to test and tweak our ads and to give feedback on ad style and placement. So if you want to help us get it right stay tuned to this blog for more details.

TiddlyWiki 2.1 Approaches

Simon — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 04:47:03 +0000

If you’re a TiddlyWiki geek like us you should get excited. 2.1 is going to hit the decks any day now… What’s so great about it?

New core support for importing tiddlers (including plugins) from other TiddlyWiki sites and local files
New PluginManager which makes managing your plugins a lot easier
New palette support to make it easy to invent your own colour scheme
Tiddler “slices” which are a way of reading meta data from the tiddler’s body
Tiddler “values/fields” let a plugin writer store arbitrary data in each tiddler

These last two are especially interesting for plugin developers. A lot of stuff is going be a lot easier than before. For example reminders could be implemented much easier now using tiddler fields. In fact I’m working on a 2.1 version of Jeremy Sheeley’s reminders. See my demo (and some other demos of 2.1 coolness) at http://mptw-beta.tiddlyspot.com/

So what does this all mean for tiddlyspot users? We will add an option to create a 2.1 site as soon as it’s out. If you want to upgrade your existing site then you can download it, do your upgrade, then reupload. We should have a step-by-step howto for that process. It would be nice to have a one-click online upgrade for tiddlyspot users as well, but that might be a little further off.

With a major TiddlyWiki update like this it’s likely that some plugins will break, hence MonkeyGTD and d3 users should stick with 2.0.x until there are 2.1 tested releases out. MPTW users, I will be testing all the main MPTW plugins, (TagglyTagging etc) as soon as I can after 2.1 final comes out. I think most of them will work (actually the important ones are already working in the mptw-beta site) so brave MPTW users can take the plunge early…

Lifehacker discovers Tiddlyspot

Simon — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 04:28:24 +0000

We got quite a lot of hits and quite of lot of new users (around 900 in a few days) after being listed here. (Looks like our new “Web 2.0″ logo had the desired affect . Welcome lifehackerers!

Also we are getting a lot of traffic from this korean site. My friend translated for me:

웹상에서 바로 쓸수 있습니다요~ 무료~
계정만드시면 자기 도메인도 생기고.만든것 다운로드 백업도 되고
좋네요… 변형된 위키들도 많으니 구경들 해보세요…
There is a site that will correctly built one for you. It is free.
If you make an account , then you get a domain. You build and download/copy and this is good…. There are many variations so try it.우앗~~~~~~~~~~
너무나 환상적이예요…와우~~~~~~~~~~~~
정말 저런 아이디어…멋져요….
너무너무 마음에 드는군요.
좋은 정보 감사해요~~~~~~~
Wow !!
That’s fantastic .. wow !!
What a great idea , cool
Thanks you very much.
Good information thank you.

Anyong haseyo miniwini readers!