Building a book/blog webpage -- is TW5 right for it?

[Kosmaton]

Hello Tiddly people,

 

I'm meaning to create a new website, and I'd like to ask your opinion whether TiddlyWiki is the right tool (or one of the tools) for it.

 

I used to have a pre-TW5 site on TiddlySpace back in the day. I'm semi-programming-and-webdesign-literate, in an ad hoc and rusty way. No experience with databases unfortunately, which may be relevant.

 

The website I have in mind would be a combination of a non-fiction book (already written, but expandable/changeable), and an associated blog. The book is organized as a big tree of numbered paragraphs/sections: 1, 1.1, 1.1.1, 1.2, 2, 2.1 etc. These sections frequently refer to one another; it's a hypertext in itself.

 

* The site would mainly need to have:

 

1) a page that displays the book, with a Table of Contents.
  - The TOC should be hideable as a whole.
  - The branches of the TOC should be collapsible, i.e. click on 1 to show 1.1 and 1.2, click again to hide them, etc.
  - It may be excessive to load all the text of the book (all the sections) into the viewport (some 70,000 words). But it would be nice if the reader saw a bit more than just the section they're currently reading. Basically a pdf-reader-like experience would be good.
  - optional: Sections of the book may get revisions, and the visitor should be able to see the revisions. (This would probably get a lot more complicated if I want to allow for reordering, deletion and creation of sections...)
  - The book currently exists as a LibreOffice Writer .odt file, with sections actually organized as headings. Ideally I'd like to automate the process of getting them into the TiddlyWiki.

 

2) a blog/news page
  - Blog posts are expected to regularly contain links to book sections, or entire transcluded sections.
  - Posts must be able to acommodate audio files; a regular HTML <audio controls> seems sufficient.

 

3) a Home page that could e.g. display
  - the most recent blog post (truncated if necessary)
  - a sort of carousel widget with single sections from the book, with arrows left and right to flip through them. These sections could be either randomly taken from the whole book, or from a hand-picked subset of sections (which I should be able to adjust).

 

* The thing really ought to be 'responsive', i.e. look fine on small screens too. This might not be obvious for something like the TOC.

 

* Towards the visitor it should not present a very TiddlyWikish face. I'm keen to acknowledge/praise/recommend TW in the About page; but the casual visitor should not focus on the underlying tech.

 

* I don't intend to have a server of my own. The free webhost I've happily used before allows for up to 2 databases, with a choice between "5.7-MySQL . 10.5-MariaDB . 13.2-PgSQL".

 

So:

 

Does this sound feasible with TW5 as a base? (Or would you suggest some other framework? If it's /challenging/ with TW, but /easy&fun/ with XYZ, I'd like to hear about XYZ too! :)

 

How would I set this up as far as server / databases etc. go?

 

If I go ahead with this, there's bound to be more detailed questions regarding the functionalities mentioned above; but if you already see any immediate solutions (plugins, say) please shout.

 

Apologies for the length of this post. I don't expect anyone to figure all this out for me, but any thoughts are very welcome. Many thanks in advance!

 

K.

[Télumire]

I'm not a dev by any means so I probably can't help you much, but I think these links may help you :

In this thread, people have successfully managed to use tiddlywiki for book publishing, with great results : https://groups.google.com/g/tiddlywiki/c/_VLufc4Svp8/m/jALzYZ09BAAJ
You can see a sample here : https://tw5.immateriel.fr/wiki/7switch/book/aHR0cHM6Ly9jYXRhbG9ndWUuaW1tYXRlcmllbC5mci9yZXNvdXJjZXMvYTYvMTIvMDcyMDhkOTdhZjdmYWZkMjkyNzRhN2MwNDU1YS5lcHVi
or make your own book from an epub : https://tw5.immateriel.fr/wiki

It's possible to use TW as a blog platform : https://tiddlywiki.com/static/Blog%2520Edition.html

So it seems that it's possible. I'm guessing it will not be simple tho.. maybe wordpress would be easier.

[Soren Bjornstad]

I wrote a TiddlyWiki book in TiddlyWiki, and people have liked the design: https://groktiddlywiki.com

I think this design badly fails your "should not present a TiddlyWikish face" criterion though.

[David Gifford]

Hi Kosmaton

You could use TiddlyWiki in node.js, and export and upload tiddlers to your free webhosting service as static htmls, no database needed. With some CSS, you could design it as you wish, in a way that it doesn't look TiddlyWiki-ish, and there are plugins to make the layout mobile-friendly. The book page, home page and news page are all doable. The book page could be handled with details elements (HTML, not the details widget plugin) and transclusions. So yes, everything you mentioned can be done.

Alternately, you could do the same with a regular standalone TW uploaded to your free webhosting service. Doing it as a standalone means the opening page would not load as quickly as a small static html page, but most people wouldn't notice the difference, and it would give you many more options for how to handle the book page, for example the table of contents feature in TiddlyWiki.

What might not work, though I may be wrong, is having a user comments section, but then you did not mention that. I know there is at least one user comments plugin, but I haven't played with it.

[Darth Mole]

Hello!

As much as I love TiddlyWiki and think it could work for your use cases, I feel I would be remiss to not point out another option: WordPress

[TW Tones]

As much as I value WordPress my personal belief is tiddlywiki would  be ideal, I would start with others book style wikis to get going. 

I understand the value of static websites for search may be valuable however the interactive wiki offers much more. The compromise would be a static site on which every page link opens  the interactive wiki, add a splash screen to inform them you are loading the whole book for easy search.

I started building a template to support this but not completed it yet. Hopefully someone has done it and can share a revised template for its export. 

If you can serve a node implementation securely on the internet would be better and it can automatically serve both static and interactive content. 

By the way 70,000 words with an average length 490,000 characters, Not even half a Megabyte is trivial, I have happily used 6-12Mb single file wikis without any concern.

Tones

[James Anderson]

I wrote a static blog exporter several years back for TW

explanation of it here: http://welford.github.io/twstaticblog/example/example.html

which itself exports to:

http://welford.github.io/twstaticblog/example/blog-styled/index.html

and 

http://welford.github.io/twstaticblog/example/blog-basic/index.html

i also use it for my personal blog here http://www.phasersonkill.com/ 

The thing is pretty flexible once you have it setup, most of what you want could be achieved. " a sort of carousel widget with single sections from the book, with arrows left and right to flip through them." might require a little extra work though.

[Mohammad Rahmani]

Hi James,

Your workflow is popular, if you look at the forum you will find many posts about it!

So, I may propose with the advent of many new features in 5.1.2x it is worth updating the workflow!

Best wishes

Mohammad

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[James Anderson]

I might do, I've not really found a short version of what will stop working when 5.2 is released. but i'd like to keep all my plugins up to date.

[Kosmaton]

Hello folks,

 

Thank you for all your answers. A lot of helpful elements. I also bumped into the Text-Slicer Edition which seems eminently useful for the book conversion part. Looks like this is actually integrated in the book browser/annotator that Télumire linked to.

 

It's still far from clear to me how I would integrate the various elements. Or get something like a numbered ToC going. That should become clearer by actually trying.

 

I may also try WordPress, as I have a bit of experience with it, and it seems easier in some ways. There appears to be a straightforward-looking ToC plugin, for instance.

 

On the other hand, tiddlers and transclusion feel like the way to go for e.g. referring to a book section from within a blog post -- as opposed to copying and pasting the text. The vague wish here is that if I at some later point e.g. add a book section so that other sections are shifted in the hierarchy, any links or transclusions to the sections involved would still point to the appropriate destinations. I need to think through wat that means in practice.

 

David mentioned a user comments section. Ideally there would be something of the kind, both for the blog posts and for every book section. But I'm not sure how to implement it, and whether I actually want Disqus-style comments. Comments-as-tiddlers might be nice... barring a sleek, curation-ready plugin for that, I might stick to "Questions? Comments? Drop an e-mail!"

 

Thanks again, all.

 

K.

 

 

Enviar: domingo 13 de junio de 2021 a las 18:06
De: "James Anderson" <james.w....@gmail.com>
Para: "TiddlyWiki" <tiddl...@googlegroups.com>
Asunto: Re: [tw5] Re: Building a book/blog webpage -- is TW5 right for it?

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/ee9f2726-1c34-4c97-a060-3f959922a029n%40googlegroups.com.