On Oct 16, 1:49 am, "Mark S." <
throa...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> No one provided a realistic solution other than to suggest a web server.
> The web servers suggested were large. After that I kind of lost interest in
> TW.
This seems an opportune moment to remind folk that using TiddlyWeb +
TiddlyWiki doesn't have to be either hard or large, it's just gained
that reputation somehow. This response isn't a reaction to TWS: that
sounds awesome and very convenient.
TiddlyWeb has been built in a way to allow people to build tools that
could make it extremely easy to use. That is rather than being
initially easy to use it is designed so that interested parties can
make versions of it that are extremely easy to use in different use
cases. Unfortunately there haven't been many of these other versions.
This could mean several different things:
* My assertion about the tools that TiddlyWeb provides is not true.
* There aren't any interested parties.
* There are interested parties and there a people who can do the
building, and these people are disjunct.
Each of these statements have persisted in the TiddlyWiki universe
since early on. The noun "TiddlyWeb" can be replaced with a variety of
names for plugins, verticals, server-sides. I'm not sure what this
means or why it is. Any ideas?
In any case, on a computer that has a healthy Python installation
(many Linux machines and many Macs) the following small number of
steps creates an operational tiddlywebwiki installation on which you
can run as many tiddlywikis as you like:
virtualenv --no-site-packages tweb
cd tweb
source bin/activate
pip install -U tiddlywebwiki
twinstance tweb
cd tweb
twanager server
open
http://0.0.0.0:8080/recipes/default/tiddlers.wiki[1]
I recognize that for many people that is complete gibberish and having
a "healthy Python installation" is a non-starter, so my point is not
that people should have to do that, but rather that _someone_ could
make a thing that encapsulates the complexity for a particular
environment (such as Windows) and by so doing make a very positive
contribution to getting tiddlers into people's hands.
If TiddlyWiki is a useful to you (the general you) because of its
standalone-and-save-itself nature, then tools like TiddlyWeb,
ccTiddly, giewiki probably don't matter; but, if what you care about
is tiddlers then each of those tools (especially TiddlyWeb if I may be
so bold) provide huge scope[3] for doing interesting things. Each of
those projects is open source, meaning they rely on community to make
them their best, yet (as far as I can discern) each has only ever had
a very small number of contributions from outside their core
developer.
Why is that?[2]
[1] It can actually be shorter than that. That list is for running the
service in a virtualenv, wherein you don't need to root access to
install packages, and the packages don't clobber other installations.
If you are root you can:
sudo pip install -U tiddlywebwiki
twinstance tweb
cd tweb
twanager server
open
http://0.0.0.0:8080/recipes/default/tiddlers.wiki[1]
[2] The TiddlyWiki community has always had a unique approach to Open
Source. Community members build around the core product, not in or on
it. This has resulted in a very diverse and exciting plugin ecosystem
but not much in the way of collaboration on shared goals. And things
look quite alien to people who are used to open source collaboration
in its common forms.
[3] Of course that scope comes with the cost of initial complexity but
like with most computer oriented things complexity can be ameliorated
with work: abstraction and encapsulation to the rescue. What can be
done to get more people involved in that work?