Journal
2022 is ending on a high note I think. There's a lot of cool new stuff, including:
- Cloning and hub listed templates. I mentioned the new cloning support on the forum and several people immediately asked about cloning other people's site, which lead to the creation of the "Templates" page where you can do literally that. See here for details on how to create and share templates like this for others to clone.
- External core javascript support. Thanks to suggestions and technical help by several community members, (see here for details) Tiddlyhost now supports "external core" TiddlyWiki which means the total file size for loading and saving can be a lot smaller due to the "core" TiddlyWiki plugin not being included in the main file. See here for a demo and further explanations, or just try it yourself by creating a site with the "external core" version of TiddlyWiki.
- Deleting and redirecting Tiddlyspot sites. It's been a long time coming, but you can now delete your claimed Tiddlyspot sites, or have them redirect all traffic to an existing Tiddlyhost site.
Support for viewing save history and viewing and restoring previous versions is also done and working nicely, but I won't talk about it in detail yet since it's likely to be one of first features that won't be available for free.
- Roughly 6,000 users, 8,000 Tiddlyhost sites and 11,000 active Tiddlyspot sites.
- Around 320 WAUs, and around 800 MAUs.
- 115 open issues and 162 closed.
- Added thumbnail images for hub sites, then later for all sites
- Added "grid view" featuring the thumbnail images
- Fixed a bug that was causing data loss in some cases
- Added new UI for choosing the site type when creating sites
- Added new UI for choosing between private, public and hub listed
- Subscription support. I'm still trying to figure out what to "unlock" for subscribed users and how to implement it.
- Tracking and restoring older versions of sites. I still like this idea but I haven't made progress with it.
- Use put saver by default for TW 5.2.3 or higher.
- Getting ready to sunset the "recover an old Tiddlyspot site from the Dreamhost bucket", see also this blog post.
It's been a while since I updated this, so let's see... Quite a lot probably.
Feather Wiki support
As announced on twitter, Tiddlyhost now supports a non-Tiddlywiki wiki called Feather Wiki. To paraphrase Feather Wiki's creator, "like TiddlyWiki but simpler and smaller". Even though it's less than 65KB, (TiddlyWiki is 2.3MB for comparison), it packs in a lot of features, including WYSIWYG and Markdown editing, and plugin support.
When I heard about Feather Wiki, I was curious to see how hard it would be to create a TiddlyWiki style "put saver". Long story short it was not too hard), and with a little Tiddlyhost tweaking Feather Wiki support was launched.
Also mentioned on twitter, Tiddlyhost emails are no longer the default plain text that comes with Devise. Now they're prettier and the text explanations are (hopefully) much better than they were before.
This is more of an "under the hood" feature. As you probably know, TiddlyWiki supports multiple different saving methods, two of which are relevant to Tiddlyhost. The "upload" method is backwards compatible with the old "Upload Plugin" that was used for the original Tiddlyspot. There's also the "put" saver which is newer, more standards based and should work with any server implementing Webdav.
Currently the default on Tiddlyhost is the upload saver, but the plan for the future is to make the put saver the default. You can try it now by checking "Enable put saver" under advanced settings. It should work with any TiddlyWiki 5 site, but the failure handling is nicer for version 5.2.3 or better.
One advantage of supporting put saving on Tiddlyhost is that it allowed the Feather Wiki support mentioned above. Another is that we can do some extra checking to help avoid accidentally overwriting changes when saving the same site in two different devices or browser tabs. There's some discussion about that in #219.
Support for upgrading to "Tiddlyhost Premium" (or something) with a monthly subscription handled by Stripe is pretty much done now, but not yet live. I'm still figuring out what features will be unlocked once you upgrade. It's likely the first one will be...
It should be easy enough to view and recover older versions of your site. This could be useful if you deleted some tiddlers by mistake, or just want to revert to a previous version. Since the storage costs are going to be significantly higher, this is likely to be non-free feature.
It's nice to have a preview thumbnail of each site. I have this working locally, but I want to rework the sites list a little before launching it, and consider how to incorporate it into the hub listings and make it look good.
We now have roughly:
- 5,000 Tiddlyhost sites (though a significant number of them are likely abandoned)
- 11,000 Tiddlyspot sites (of the 100,000 ever created)
- 440 MAUs and 174 WAUs
- 107 open issues and 117 closed
We've also survived a server upgrade and a two week fully afk holiday (phew).
- We're now using the newly released TiddlyWiki 5.2.0 for new sites, (which I'm happy about since up until now we were using an unstable prerelease build of TiddlyWiki).
- An updated FAQ which describes how to upgrade sites to the latest version of TiddlyWiki.
- You can now change the site password for your claimed legacy Tiddlyspot sites.
- Some miscellaneous hub improvements.
We now have roughly:
- 2000 Tiddlyhost sites
- 7800 Tiddlyspot sites (of the 100,000 ever created)
- 200 of which have been updated at least once
- 140 of which have been "claimed" by a Tiddlyhost user
- 350 MAUs
- 130 WAUs
- 93 open issues and 86 closed
- Tiddlyhost is now officially listed as a saving option on TiddlyWiki.com!
- Some new docs which explain how the "TiddlySpot Saver" configuration works look for Tiddlyhost and Tiddlyspot.
- The TW Classic jsMath plugin is fixed for old Tiddlyspot sites that used it.
- Under-the-hood stuff:
- The nginx web front end now serves rails static assets directly.
- Sites are now stored (zlib) compressed.
- Some caching with memcached.
- Tags and description for your claimed Tiddlyspot sites
- Tiddlyspot sites in the Hub
- New URLs for using tiddler data externally, in particular:
https://<sitename>.tiddlyhost.com/tiddlers.jsonhttps://<sitename>.tiddlyhost.com/text/<tiddlername>.tid- (Click the above links to see an example.)
- CORS headers for those URLs so data can be fetched cross-domain
- A brand new About page
- A new user menu incorporating the logout button
- Sort hub sites by recently updated
- Remember sort option when clicking users and tags in the hub
- Some improvements to the site settings edit form
We now have roughly:
- 500 sites
- 5000 Tiddlyspot sites
- 250 MAUs
- 65 WAUs
- 68 open issues and 60 closed
Let's see... Probably #87 and #3.
Tiddlyspot "save to web" is back!
How is it possible?!
Tiddlyhost has taken over the tiddlyspot.com domain name and now serves all the old Tiddlyspot sites, with "save to web" support just like the old days. Try it and let me know if you have problems.
Tiddlyspot saving is user/password based and doesn't require a Tiddlyhost account or a login, but if you do have a Tiddlyhost account you can claim ownership of a Tiddlyspot site. This lets you see it in your sites list, and (in future) will let you do things like change the password, and maybe some other stuff I won't mention just yet.
But really, how?
See this PR if you really want to know.
What's new:
- TiddlyWiki Classic support.
- Support for uploading an existing TiddlyWiki.
- A guide on how to upload an existing TiddlyWiki, especially if it's 5.1.23 or older.
- A fix/workaround for accessing the 5.1.23 plugin library.
Current focus:
- How do I create a plugin? (A lot has changed since the old days. I have some learning to do.)
Hub related updates:
- Clickable tags. Example.
- Clickable usernames. Example. Note: This requires adding a username to your account, which you can do here.
- Gravatar profile pics Note: This is off by default, but you can enable it here.
- Searching. Example.
- Sorting, by name or view count. Example.
Site related updates:
- Renaming sites no longer breaks saving
- A download button
- View counts
Meta:
- Not sure if I'll continue to maintain this journal here. Perhaps it could move to a TiddlyWiki, along with the FAQ.
- I guess some of the above items aren't all that new since I mentioned them below already.
Stats:
- So far we have 74 active users (for some definition of active), and 88 sites.
- There are currently 41 open issues, and 12 closed.
According to this blog post, we've launched. The "hub" is somewhat experimental, but I think it has some potential.
Recent new features:
- Site view counters
- A download link
- Clickable tags
Let's Encrypt is awesome. We're live! See 31e9371 for more details.
I'm not sure if it's production ready yet, so let's proceed slowly until I have a better idea how stable things are on the current hosting solution.
(From original README.md)
Rough plan:
- Should be 100% containerized from the start
- Should use SSL from the start
- Will use Rails, for better or for worse
- Should have a serious deploy process (somehow)
- Should support subscription billing for users (somehow)
- Use S3 for saving Tiddlywiki files (probably)