[NoteSelf] Bug fixes and (cool) new features

[Danielo Rodríguez]

Hello everyone,

New weekend and new version of NoteSelf. I'm proud to announce that we have fixed several bugs and also added a couple of modest features.

Bug Fixes

• There was a bug preventing any kind of tiddler exportation, instead a JSON representation of the database was exported. This bug has been fixed and now you can export any tiddler in any format as usual
• Now it is possible to properly save the wiki in html.
•  Previously, because the synchronous nature of the saving mechanism (and the async one of the syncer module) you may end with incomplete files (not containing all your tiddlers). 
• Now when you save the wiki we make sure that all the tiddlers are loaded
• Please note that for some reason this only works on the offline version. IT WILL NOT WORK ON THE ONLINE ONE
• Palettes and palette tiddler have been added to the list of startup tiddlers. No more colors suddenly appearing after startup!! 
  

New features

• Better login flow. Now if the browser has a cookie it will be picked automatically. This will save you unnecessary login typing!! 
• This is also way more secure than the basic authentication used before.
• Synchronization changes are (almost) reflected instantly. Check it out this small GIFbetween two browsers simulating this situation
• This feature is somewhat experimental, and may benefit from performance improvements in the future

• From the previous GIF you may have noticed that different tiddlers were open, that's because StoryList is not synced anymore between devices!! 
  
• This should allow a better multi user experience. 
• However editing conflicts between the same tiddlers are not guaranteed to be satisfactory
• The Save config button from the control panel has been renamed to Save empty, which IMO is more correct
• This button now works and does something: it downloads the wiki empty, with all the plugins and configurations, but without ANY TIDDLER
• For some reason, THIS DOES NOT WORK NEITHER ON THE ONLINE VERSION, only on the offline one. So if you want to bake some plugins in your own copy, go for the offline version

Hope you enjoy this new features and bugfixes, and enjoy even more using NoteSelf.

Suggestions, questions, pull requests... everything is welcome!

Regards

[Ste Wilson]

Oohhhh! Shiny :)

I'll hopefully have a play with it at work this week.

Cheers

[Jeremy Ruston]

Great stuff Danielo, I shall look forward to playing with the new version.

Best wishes

Jeremy.

--

Jeremy Ruston

jer...@jermolene.com

http://jermolene.com

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[JWHoneycutt]

How far I've gotten:

• 1) Created a Cloudant account: https://jwhoneycutt.cloudant.com
  • 1A) In Cloudant -> Account -> CORS: Enabled CORS and restricted to specific domain: https://noteself.github.io
• 2) Open https://noteself.github.io/ in Google Chrome (for some reason people keep saying to start TW5's in Google Chrome and use them in FireFox)
• 2A) In the GettingStarted tiddler I change the following entries:

Notebook Name: JWH_NoteSelf

CouchDB URL: https://jwhoneycutt.cloudant.com (right?)

Remote database name: JWH_NoteSelf

Page title: JWH_NoteSelf

• 3) I click on Save Config button - and a popup appears: "noteself.github.io says: Configuration has been changed and saved. It is necessary to reload the window. Are you OK with it?" -> I click OK
• 4) A "Loading" paints green from left to right for a few seconds, and the red circlecheck icon turns gray. It is next to a new button on the sideBar labelled OFFLINE (In the silent video this converts to a cloudcheck icon)
• 5) I save a new tiddler as a test and Chrome creates a file "tiddlywiki (5).html" in my downloads folder
• 6) I move this file from Downloads folder to Dropbox/TW5 folder and rename it JWH_NoteSelf.html
• 7) I drag this newly renamed file to the FireFox address bar and it fails to load with a big red error box: "Internal JavaScript Error, Well, this is embarrassing. It is recommended that you restart TiddlyWiki by refreshing your browser -ReferenceError: $TPouch is not defined" - since refreshing the address bar doesn't help - I close the tab in FireFox
• 8) I open TiddlyDesktop and "Add a TiddlyWiki file": I select Dropbox/TW5/JWH_NoteSelf.html and it doesn't load it, so I close all TW5 files and reload TiddlyDesktop
• 9) If (happens half the time) TiddlyWiki Desktop does load it - when I try to open it - it gives the same "Internal JavaScript Error" in a big red box.
• 10) Same error if I just try to double click JWH_NoteSelf.html in the dropbox folder (set to default open with FireFox)

Maybe I violated some JavaScript convention when I renamed the file, or moved it?

JWHoneycutt

[Alfonso Arciniega]

JWHoneycutt,

You are not alone. The "Internal JavaScript Error" happened to me every time when using NoteSelf offline. Now I see it also happens online too...

Best,

Alfonso

On Friday, July 14, 2017 at 12:35:04 PM UTC-6, JWHoneycutt wrote:

How far I've gotten:

• 7) I drag this newly renamed file to the FireFox address bar and it fails to load with a big red error box: "Internal JavaScript Error, Well, this is embarrassing. It is recommended that you restart TiddlyWiki by refreshing your browser -ReferenceError: $TPouch is not defined" - since refreshing the address bar doesn't help - I close the tab in FireFox
  

[codacoder...@outlook.com]

Me too. Can't use it locally at all.

[@TiddlyTweeter]

one more try.

one more song.

one more day.

NoteSelf is marvellous.

BUT ITS DIFFICULT to get it working sometimes.

Daniello kinda knows that, but maybe not so well as he needs to.

Josiah  x

[Danielo Rodríguez]

Hello JWHoneycutt,

El viernes, 14 de julio de 2017, 20:35:04 (UTC+2), JWHoneycutt escribió:

How far I've gotten:

• 1) Created a Cloudant account: https://jwhoneycutt.cloudant.com
  • 1A) In Cloudant -> Account -> CORS: Enabled CORS and restricted to specific domain: https://noteself.github.io
• 2) Open https://noteself.github.io/ in Google Chrome (for some reason people keep saying to start TW5's in Google Chrome and use them in FireFox)
• 2A) In the GettingStarted tiddler I change the following entries:

Notebook Name: JWH_NoteSelf

CouchDB URL: https://jwhoneycutt.cloudant.com (right?)

Remote database name: JWH_NoteSelf

Page title: JWH_NoteSelf

• 3) I click on Save Config button - and a popup appears: "noteself.github.io says: Configuration has been changed and saved. It is necessary to reload the window. Are you OK with it?" -> I click OK
• 4) A "Loading" paints green from left to right for a few seconds, and the red circlecheck icon turns gray. It is next to a new button on the sideBar labelled OFFLINE (In the silent video this converts to a cloudcheck icon)

Until this point, all your steps were correct. If you see the offline button it means that you don't have a cookie on the browser, so you have to activelly login. Click on it and provide your credentials, the cloud icon should appear.

 

• 5) I save a new tiddler as a test and Chrome creates a file "tiddlywiki (5).html" in my downloads folder

I don't understand this step. Do you mean that you create a new tiddler and then you click on the save button ? The tiddlywiki one ?

 

• 6) I move this file from Downloads folder to Dropbox/TW5 folder and rename it JWH_NoteSelf.html
• 7) I drag this newly renamed file to the FireFox address bar and it fails to load with a big red error box: "Internal JavaScript Error, Well, this is embarrassing. It is recommended that you restart TiddlyWiki by refreshing your browser -ReferenceError: $TPouch is not defined" - since refreshing the address bar doesn't help - I close the tab in FireFox
• 8) I open TiddlyDesktop and "Add a TiddlyWiki file": I select Dropbox/TW5/JWH_NoteSelf.html and it doesn't load it, so I close all TW5 files and reload TiddlyDesktop
• 9) If (happens half the time) TiddlyWiki Desktop does load it - when I try to open it - it gives the same "Internal JavaScript Error" in a big red box.
• 10) Same error if I just try to double click JWH_NoteSelf.html in the dropbox folder (set to default open with FireFox)

Maybe I violated some JavaScript convention when I renamed the file, or moved it?

I don't understand what are you trying to accomplish with those steps. If you pretend to use NoteSelf hosted somewhere else, I mean, different from https://noteself.github.io/online that is not the correct way. First, you should download the offline version, which is ready to work out of noteshelf domain. Then, on you cloudant account you should enable cors for any domain, because you are going to serve your file from a different domain. You see the RSOD because the online version depends on some stuff that is only available when it is loaded from https://noteself.github.io/online.

There is a big green button on https://noteself.github.io/ to get the offline version. Try it out, but with your first 4 steps you have a working NoteSelf instance "installed" in your browser that will work exactly the same as the offline version. There is no to little sense to download the file to your computer

[Danielo Rodríguez]

I just tried the method I have explained and it works perfectly fine for me.

Here is the download button you have to use

[Lost Admin]

Afraid not.

Downloaded using the download button from noteself.github.io;

saved to 'downloads' directory;

opened on Windows 7 using the "open with ..." method;

Used Google Chrome 56.0.2924.76 (as deployed by my employer);

And I got errors:

[Danielo Rodríguez]

El martes, 18 de julio de 2017, 15:29:32 (UTC+2), Lost Admin escribió:

Afraid not.

Downloaded using the download button from noteself.github.io;

saved to 'downloads' directory;

opened on Windows 7 using the "open with ..." method;

Used Google Chrome 56.0.2924.76 (as deployed by my employer);

And I got errors:

Those errors may happen from time to time. Do they persist if you create a tiddler and refresh the page? 

[Lost Admin]

Yes, and the 2nd error shows up for the new tiddler while editing and saving it. The first error shows up repeatedly.

Also, after refresh, the new tiddler is missing. I'm starting to suspect that you can't create an indexdb from a local file in Chrome (at least the version I'm running). 

It works without error when I access the exact same file from a simple http server.

[JWHoneycutt]

How far I've gotten: (revised post Danielo's comments)

1) Created a Cloudant account: https://jwhoneycutt.cloudant.com

1A) In Cloudant -> Account -> CORS: Enabled CORS and restricted to specific domain:https://noteself.github.io

2) Open https://noteself.github.io/ in Google Chrome (for some reason people keep saying to start TW5's in Google Chrome and use them in FireFox)

2A) Download (instead of Online) - gives me Empty.html in Downloaded folder

2B) In the GettingStarted tiddler I change the following entries:

• Notebook Name: JWH_NoteSelf
• CouchDB URL: https://jwhoneycutt.cloudant.com (right?)
• Remote database name: JWH_NoteSelf
• Page title: JWH_NoteSelf

3) I click on Save Config button - and a popup appears: "noteself.github.io says: Configuration has been changed and saved. It is necessary to reload the window. Are you OK with it?" -> I click OK

4) A "Loading" paints green from left to right for a few seconds, and the red circlecheck icon turns gray. It is next to a new button on the sideBar labelled OFFLINE (In the silent video this converts to a cloudcheck icon)

4A) Click the OFFLINE box in SideBar (if you see one you don't have a cookie) and enter your Cloudant Username and PW

4B) A yellow popup states: "PouchAdaptor (time/date stamp) Login Failed"

4C) According to Danielo, the OFFLINE box should have converted to a Cloud icon (but it didn't)

At this point, the JWH_NoteSelf.html file gives a big red JavaScript error, no matter how I try to access it.

I tried bringing it into Atom (the text editor I am trying to learn to use), but can't find what to change to fix the html file and make it functional again.

Danielo writes:

I don't understand what are you trying to accomplish with those steps. If you pretend to use NoteSelf hosted somewhere else, I mean, different from https://noteself.github.io/online that is not the correct way. First, you should download the offline version, which is ready to work out of noteshelf domain. Then, on you cloudant account you should enable cors for any domain, because you are going to serve your file from a different domain. You see the RSOD because the online version depends on some stuff that is only available when it is loaded from https://noteself.github.io/online.

There is a big green button on https://noteself.github.io/ to get the offline version. Try it out, but with your first 4 steps you have a working NoteSelf instance "installed" in your browser that will work exactly the same as the offline version. There is no to little sense to download the file to your computer

I don't understand something fundamental here. I keep ALL my TiddlyWiki.html files in DropBox. I sync when wifi is available. When I am away from wifi (at work for me) I enter tons of tiddlers and make sure that I sync my DropBox account online when I get home - definitely before I access a TW5.html file from my home desktop (or else I have competing versions).

This scenario causes me to have to be very careful about keeping the latest version of a TW5.html file either on my laptop or synced to DropBox.

It is this background that has me interested in TWEdit5 for iOS (still in Beta) because I REALLY want to be able to create permanent tiddlers on my iPhone from anywhere.

It is this same backdrop that has me trying to make NoteSelf work - I can use it RIGHT NOW - yes, but I can't get to my edited changes later... at least, not yet.

By the Way - thank you for your work, help, and comments - I really see how noble a cause this can become.

JWHoneycutt

[Lost Admin]

I might regret this, but I'm going to attempt to help you JWHoneycutt.

NoteSelf does not work like TiddlyWiki even though it is built on top of TiddlyWiki.

NoteSelf stores all of your content online on a server. The server in question uses the Apache CouchDB server software. There is a service provider called Cloudant that hosts that software and offers use of it for free provided you stay below some limits they have defined. Because of the nature of NoteSelf, it is almost impossible for a single person using a single NoteSelf to actually go over those limits.

The NoteSelf html file that Danielo says to download is a collection of HTML, CSS, and Javascript that implements a front-end to the CouchDB server and provides the same functionality as TiddlyWiki. But, unlike TiddlyWiki, it doesn't save your changes locally. Instead it saves them to the server. To speed things up for you NoteSelf also stores a copy in the browser's local data (more on this later). This also means that if you use your NoteSelf when you are unable to connect to the CouchDB server, your changes get stored in the browser and sync to the server the next time that browser on that computer is used and connected to the server.

In order for the browser to be connected to the server, you need to log-in to the server. That is where the cloud/offline button comes in. If it shows offline, then you need to log-in. If it shows the cloud, then you are logged in and it will try to sync.

Here is a picture of a sample NoteSelf that is successfully connected to the CouchDB server, note the cloud icon:

Here is a chopped up screenshot of the browser locally stored data that Noteself created and uses: You can see yours (on Chrome) :

1 in the Chrome Menu (3 vertical dots) -> More Tools -> Developer Tools

2 open Noteself

3 in the developer tools window (mine is on the right side of the browser window) choose Application (menu near the top of the developer tools area)

And, the same information also exists on the CouchDB server. Here is a cut of a screenshot of the couchdb management interface showing the database that stores the data for the above NoteSelf:'

finally, the actual contents of the Start Tiddler in CouchDB:

Did that help or make things even more confusing?

[codacoder...@outlook.com]

Wow.  "NoteSelf - The Missing Manual"

[JWHoneycutt]

@Lost Admin

Thank you - This is extremely useful.

The bastardized simplification is that an online database holds the wiki, and I may work on an OFFLINE version until I sync online again. This basically replaces the functionality of Dropbox. 

I will stop trying to force my concept of how it works onto NoteSelf, and Danielo's comments make sense in this framework.

I will try to follow the instructions you provide, right after I get a project paper submitted... I'm excited about getting my cloud icon up and running.

Thank you !

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Tutti, Small comments ...

NoteSelf is currently largely MAGIC. 

Meaning its actually quite difficult to conceptually grasp what it is & how it works. In time it will get clearer. That is NOT a criticism. Its an observation on a technology that just works a different way.

I am still myself unclear on several points ...

(1) CORS settings in Cloudant and what the addressing they ask you for there does? Do you need a "stub" at the address?

(2) Still unclear in the difference between the DOWNLOAD version and the ONLINE version.

(3) Am very hazy about COOKIE setting when using the ONLINE version.

(4) I get the impression that some tiddlers -- like PLUGINS for instance -- can be "hard-coded" into the DOWNLOAD version, rather than be in the browser database. In other words, there is a "sort-of" TW that exists outside the PouchDB for the download version?

(5) I'm unclear IF and HOW one can convert a DOWNLOAD version into a synchronising one with a cloud database version.

Best wishes
Josiah

[Lost Admin]

On Thursday, July 20, 2017 at 3:19:06 AM UTC-4, @TiddlyTweeter wrote:

Tutti, Small comments ...

NoteSelf is currently largely MAGIC. 

Meaning its actually quite difficult to conceptually grasp what it is & how it works. In time it will get clearer. That is NOT a criticism. Its an observation on a technology that just works a different way.

I am still myself unclear on several points ...

(1) CORS settings in Cloudant and what the addressing they ask you for there does? Do you need a "stub" at the address?

I had to look this one up too, when I first ran into it. CORS stands for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing. One needs to understand a bit about how the web works. A website serves up an HTML document. That HTML document has links to other things that are used to render the final page. These things include pictures and stylesheets and javascript. If they all come from the same http server (host and domain) they they are from the "same origin". If they get them from some other http server, then they are cross-origin.

For example, if you create a website that makes use of jquery you can choose to host a copy of the jquery library on your own website (same-origin) or to have your html page get it from the public google repository (cross-origin).

CORS came into existence to stop thing like linking images from other people's websites without permission among other things like CouchDB.

The reason you need to set-up CORS is that CouchDB was designed from the start to be a database server that is accessible directly over the Internet. As such they made a few unusual design decisions (from a database perspective). Whereas a traditional database (like say MySQL) uses an SQL interface with a somewhat simple network protocol, CouchDB chose to use HTTP as the interface and network protocol.

So, we use CORS (a relatively recent extension of HTTP) as a security setting in CouchDB. It tells the CouchDB server what other websites are allowed to send code to a browser that can be used to make calls to the CouchDB server.

(2) Still unclear in the difference between the DOWNLOAD version and the ONLINE version.

This also takes a bit to grasp. In the simplest way I can think of, NoteSelf takes TiddlyWiki (a single-file document) and turns it into the client side of a client-server application. Danielo's genius was in figuring out how to make it do that so elegantly.

One of Danielo's plugin(s) is like a modification to the TiddlyWiki json export function. Except instead of exporting to a file for download, it exports to a CouchDB server through a REST call. And it does it automatically every time you save a tiddler.

 

(3) Am very hazy about COOKIE setting when using the ONLINE version.

This is a requirement from CouchDB. The CouchDB server uses http cookie based authentication. When you log-in to the CouchDB, it sets a cookie. That cookie is used as a token to say "hey this guy logged in".

Since CouchDB supports people writing their own login forms, Danielo did that. That is what the login popup does when you click the OFFLINE button and it turns into a cloud. It sends your credentials to the CouchDB server, and if login succeeds, you get cookie.

 

(4) I get the impression that some tiddlers -- like PLUGINS for instance -- can be "hard-coded" into the DOWNLOAD version, rather than be in the browser database. In other words, there is a "sort-of" TW that exists outside the PouchDB for the download version?

The DOWNLOAD version is the traditional TW way.

There is exactly a TW that exists outside of PouchDB. But if you do it entirely the NoteSelf way, that TW is always the empty.html version. Everything else comes from CouchDB.

PouchDB is like CouchDB, except it is written entirely in javascript, only usable by the browser that runs it, and uses the Browser's local storage (specifically the recently introduced IndexDB local storage). 

(5) I'm unclear IF and HOW one can convert a DOWNLOAD version into a synchronising one with a cloud database version.

Danielo's PouchDB plugin holds all the magic. It has the PouchDB and the interface for CouchDB. If you put it into any existing TW5, you have turned it into a NoteSelf (I think that's all it takes). You then, of course, need to set-up the cloud database server stuff.

This next bit I'm not completely clear on (I haven't dug into Danielo's code enough yet). I believe that once you have the PouchDB plugins added and you've added the settings to communicate with the CouchDB, it works pretty much like a new TiddlyWiki saver. When you save a change to a tiddler, it sends that tiddler to the local storage of the browser though PouchDB and updates the CouchDB (send a json formatted version of the tiddler).

Because there needs to be a bit of bootstrap to get all the PouchDB/CouchDB stuff working, there are a few tiddlers that are an exception to the "send to PouchDB/CouchDB". These always come from the html file.

And since you always have that html file (the empty.html from noteself.github.io) and it is Tiddlywiki with a special sort of saver, you can do everything you would do with TiddlyWiki like adding plugins to it or adding tiddlers to it. You then get your own download version.

Finally, because Danielo built on-top of TiddlyWiki, you can still save your NoteSelf wiki just like you can save TiddlyWiki (as a single file).

One final word:

PouchDB (https://pouchdb.com/) is a javascript library that makes use of browser storage to provide a database interface and also synchronize that database to a back-end server. The back-end server software it supports is Apache's CouchDB (http://couchdb.apache.org/)

It can get confusing when needing to talk about both. In general terms Pouch is in your browser, Couch is on a server.

 

Best wishes
Josiah

[codacoder...@outlook.com]

"NoteSelf - The Missing Manual - Part II"

Seriously... excellent, Lost Admin.  Thank you!

[Lost Admin]

It's just chapter 2.

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao Lost Admin & Daniello

I am STILL unclear about CORS.

Not so much the addressing CouchDB needs, but more about WHAT (if anything) needs to be at the domain/address?

Am I right in thinking that at the CORS listed domain there needs to be a NoteSelf of some sort that a user is using? That there needs to be some "software" that forms a bridge between the local and the Cloudant database? Like a core of Noteself that assists the magic? Or am I injecting excess meanings into all this?

By way of background, I have access to several of my own unique addresses and am trying to figure out the EASIEST way to make my own ONLINE  version of Noteself suited to my aims.

So far its not working. Probably because I have no idea what I am doing.

Best wishes
Josiah

Lost Admin wrote:

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao Daniello & tutti

I suddenly realised A MISSING PIECE in these discussions of NoteSelf. We talk about Local (Pouch) & Online Cloud (Couch) ... but what is missing is WHERE IS MY PUBLIC WEBSITE?

You have one integrated with it. But, *how* would I do that?  That is really unclear to me.

Best wishes
Josiah

[Danielo Rodríguez]

Hello again Lost Admin

El miércoles, 19 de julio de 2017, 15:05:27 (UTC+2), Lost Admin escribió:

I might regret this, but I'm going to attempt to help you JWHoneycutt.

NoteSelf does not work like TiddlyWiki even though it is built on top of TiddlyWiki.

NoteSelf stores all of your content online on a server....

That is a very great explanation that makes things easier to understand. I would love to make it part of the FAQ of NoteSelf. As I said, if you have the time and will I will welcome a PR. This is very good material.

Wow.  "NoteSelf - The Missing Manual"

The reason I never compared TW to NoteSelf side by side is because I was expecting most of the users coming from other services (for example, Evernote, o google keep) rather from the TW community. So I didn't wanted to confuse potentially new users pointing them to something they don't know and understand.

I'm sorry to see that so many people is having problems to understand what NoteSelf is, apart from what Tiddlywiki is. I made the best I could. Luckily Lost Admin is helping a lot in making things clearer.

[Danielo Rodríguez]

Hello Josiah

El jueves, 20 de julio de 2017, 9:19:06 (UTC+2), @TiddlyTweeter escribió:

Tutti, Small comments ...

NoteSelf is currently largely MAGIC. 

Hope that is not so bad as it sounds.

 

Meaning its actually quite difficult to conceptually grasp what it is & how it works. In time it will get clearer. That is NOT a criticism. Its an observation on a technology that just works a different way.

To be honest, the only people that I think they may get confused are the current TW users. Most (if not any) of the confusion here is because people is trying to treat NoteSel as a file, rather than an online service. It is better if you understand it as an online service, and NoteSelf is it's front-end. You can think in NoteSelf like a tiddler explorer, to see tiddlers that are stored on a database, like a file explorer just allows you to see your files, and it does not hold your files. NoteSelf is just an UI, an app to access your tiddlers stored somewhere, no matter if that place is your local browser or a remote database.

If you try to compare it to tiddlywiki, if you force it to be what it is not, then you will get confused as most of the TW users does.

 

I am still myself unclear on several points ...

(1) CORS settings in Cloudant and what the addressing they ask you for there does? Do you need a "stub" at the address?

 

(2) Still unclear in the difference between the DOWNLOAD version and the ONLINE version.

There is NO difference. They both do exactly the same thing. The download version is useful if you want to host it on your own site. I said this hundred times, but there is no point about downloading it to your computer, it just makes no sense. I think I will hide the download button a bit more, maybe moving it to an "advanced use" section.

 

(4) I get the impression that some tiddlers -- like PLUGINS for instance -- can be "hard-coded" into the DOWNLOAD version, rather than be in the browser database. In other words, there is a "sort-of" TW that exists outside the PouchDB for the download version?

Yes, you can hard-code some stuff into the html file. I will call this "compile NoteSelf". Let's think about this with the previous example, the file explorer. If you want to add a new button to your file explorer, you have to edit the code and compile it. Now your file explorer has that button every time you open it. Good. The only difference is that NoteSelf allows you to install plugins without "compiling" them into NoteSelf. 

So, to summarize:

• If you install a plugin int o a NoteBook, then it will be only available on that NoteBook
  
• If you compile NoteSelf with several plugins they will be available on that "instance" of NoteSelf and all the notebooks you open with it, but they are not saved into the NoteBook, so if you open your NoteBook with a different NoteSelf app without the plugins "compilled into it" they will not be available.
  

 

(5) I'm unclear IF and HOW one can convert a DOWNLOAD version into a synchronising one with a cloud database version.

As I said, the DOWNLOAD version does the same thing than the online version, so the procedure is the same.

I think I will ask people to stop referring to the Download version as Offline. It is simply not true, is not meant to be used as a regular TW file, is just the same app on your computer rather than the cloud.

Regards

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Hola Danielo,

Actually, I meant MAGIC positively. NoteSelf works. The "magic" relates to my not understanding how it works. In other words, I want to understand your magic tricks :-)

Danielo Rodríguez wrote:

@TiddlyTweeter escribió:

NoteSelf is currently largely MAGIC. 

Hope that is not so bad as it sounds.

Best wishes
Josiah

[Lost Admin]

On Friday, July 21, 2017 at 4:12:25 AM UTC-4, Danielo Rodríguez wrote:

Hello again Lost Admin

El miércoles, 19 de julio de 2017, 15:05:27 (UTC+2), Lost Admin escribió:

I might regret this, but I'm going to attempt to help you JWHoneycutt.

NoteSelf does not work like TiddlyWiki even though it is built on top of TiddlyWiki.

NoteSelf stores all of your content online on a server....

That is a very great explanation that makes things easier to understand. I would love to make it part of the FAQ of NoteSelf. As I said, if you have the time and will I will welcome a PR. This is very good material.

You have my permission to include anything I post to this list in the FAQ for NoteSelf (or include in other NoteSelf documentation).

As to the PR stuff, I'm still fiddling with what I want to accomplish. Once I've done that and confirmed that I've got an actual problem in need of fixing (as opposed to me just not understanding how to do it right), I'll post PRs.

 

Wow.  "NoteSelf - The Missing Manual"

The reason I never compared TW to NoteSelf side by side is because I was expecting most of the users coming from other services (for example, Evernote, o google keep) rather from the TW community. So I didn't wanted to confuse potentially new users pointing them to something they don't know and understand.

I would agree with that stance. NoteSelf is much more like a "web app" and understandable in that context. TW sort of turns the web on it's head. TW would be far more confusing to a newcommer.

I'm sorry to see that so many people is having problems to understand what NoteSelf is, apart from what Tiddlywiki is. I made the best I could. Luckily Lost Admin is helping a lot in making things clearer.

It took me a while (and a lot of investigation) before I realized what you had done. I'm trying to share that knowledge now.

 

[Lost Admin]

To build your own NoteSelf environment, think of it as a modern web app, you only need a few things:

1) A server to host it all (you can use 2 servers if you want).

2) A web server that can serve static web pages.

3) A CouchDB server that is accessible from the Internet.

To do so:

1) Go get the empty.html document from notself.github.io (that's the download button at the bottom of the page).

2) Set-up your static web server.

3) Put the empty.html file on your static web servers (you can even make it the root index.html if you want).

4) Set-up your CouchDB server (you can use the free Cloudant service since that's what it provides).

4.1) Put the base URL of your web server in the CORS setting of CouchDB.

For example if the url to your empty.html file is http://www.example.com/empty.html then put "http://www.example.com" (this would allow any file coming from http://www.example.com/" to use the database).

If you only want to allow access from the specific file, put the full URL in instead "http://www.example.com/empty.html"

5) Load your newly created website into your browser (http://www.example.com/empty.html) and fill-out the settings for couchdb and database name.

  couchdb url would be the url to your couchdb instances (if you used cloudant, they provide it to you).

  database name is the name you used when you set-up couchdb.

6) use the Noteself login process to log-in. These are the credentials you used to set-up couchdb.

7) Make some changes to your newly created NoteSelf instance.

8) Go to another device (if you used your desktop, try your phone) and repeat steps 5 and 6.

On Thursday, July 20, 2017 at 8:31:15 PM UTC-4, @TiddlyTweeter wrote:

Ciao Lost Admin & Daniello

I am STILL unclear about CORS.

Not so much the addressing CouchDB needs, but more about WHAT (if anything) needs to be at the domain/address?

Am I right in thinking that at the CORS listed domain there needs to be a NoteSelf of some sort that a user is using? That there needs to be some "software" that forms a bridge between the local and the Cloudant database? Like a core of Noteself that assists the magic? Or am I injecting excess meanings into all this?

You are right in thinking that CORS lists the domain where you house the NoteSelf file that can be downloaded.

You are over-thinking the "software". Somewhat like it is initially difficult to grasp that TW is both application and data in a single file, it is difficult to grasp that NoteSelf is the software that bridges the connection to the cloudant database. 

 

By way of background, I have access to several of my own unique addresses and am trying to figure out the EASIEST way to make my own ONLINE  version of Noteself suited to my aims.

So far its not working. Probably because I have no idea what I am doing.

I've got a working instance built entirely in a VM (VirtualBox), so it's not accessible to anyone but me. I'll see if I can build something that is publicly accessible and write-up a how-to with screenshots in the process.

[Lost Admin]

I just tried to set-up a cloudant account. IBM has started integrating cloudant into their "bluemix" swamp of products. Create and account and you will understand why I call it a "swamp".

Danielo's video is going to need to be re-done. They have turned the management interface into a big ugly mess.

I haven't figured out how to make use of the bluemix "api keys" to actually log-in to it so I can use noteself. I wonder if this is TiddlyTweeter's problem too?

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao LA

Right. It changed. Previously Bluemix & old style IBM Cloudant were separate sites. Its likely much the same under the hood--but it sure is confusing in a situation that is already involving MAGIC :-).

Josiah

[Richard Campbell]

Great stuff; still having trouble with the smileapps CouchDB

I had to set CORS to * which isn't great but more importantly....

The authentication seems to work, but the login system seems to fail on getting the favicon....

syncer-browser: Attempting to login as admin      $:/core/modules/utils/logger.js:30

PouchAdaptor: About to log in...                  $:/core/modules/utils/logger.js:30

PouchAdaptor: Login succeed                       $:/core/modules/utils/logger.js:30

syncer-browser: Retrieving skinny tiddler list    sw.js:57

Uncaught (in promise) Error: https://noteself.github.io/online/favicon.ico not found in cache

    at sw.js:57

    at <anonymous>

(anonymous) @ sw.js:57                            favicon.ico

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 () favicon.ico:1

GET https://noteself.github.io/online/favicon.ico 404 ()

[Arlen Beiler]

I noticed there was a note about deleting the lite service after 30 days of inactivity. Will be something you will want to check into when switching to bluemix. But, looking at the bluemix site, there are a lot more options available, so there might be something else that works well.

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[Arlen Beiler]

Good evening Danielo, 

Just thought I'd mention that I've been using Amazon Web Services for different projects recently, so I decided to see what might be easily available, and it appears that DynamoDB might work well for what we want to do with it. And for our use case, it should be free. I don't know how compatible the APIs are. But if you can have PouchDB sync with DynamoDB, it would work. 

I remember that Google also has some kind of database offering, but I don't know if it is as easily usable as AWS's DynamoDB. 

There are also other options

• The pouchdb-server, which runs on node. 
• Storage on Amazon S3 is only a few pennies per GB. 
• And we also have Google Drive and Dropbox which we could use in a more serious way than we currently are. I may tackle these two in the future as they could be useful with TiddlyWiki on Node (and TiddlyServer). Being able to sync to and load from external locations will provide more options for hosting TiddlyWiki online. 
  
• Firebase (https://firebase.google.com/) is another service very much like PouchDB, but with its own API. I don't know how simple it is though. Seems fairly complicated, and might be something that could be more useful in other ways.
• Heroku (https://www.heroku.com/) is simpler and you could use it to run TiddlyServer or NodeTW5 if you had somewhere to load and sync the tiddlers, as you cannot store anything on the file system other than what is preloaded. 
• Docker? Maybe.

I don't know that any of these are drop-in replacements, but I thought I would mention them. The common denominator is that they are all free for low usage (like ours). But, for under $5 / month, there are a lot of options available, it seems. 

Anyway, just some tired thoughts. Hopefully you or someone else may find something useful here.

-Arlen

[Mark S.]

I've followed the directions and video as best I can to do an online Noteself. The problem is that it never logs into the cloudant database. The button says Offline. I click on the button and on Firefox nothing happens. I try it again on Chrome and I get a password and username box. I fill it out and submit. But it continues to say offline. I feel there is some missing magic step.

Thanks,
Mark

[Arlen Beiler]

Did you set CORS? CORS needs to be set to the URL you are using. I thought it gets set automatically, but maybe not. CORS is a setting in the Cloudant dashboard.

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[Mark S.]

Yes, I set CORS. I even set it to allow all domains thinking that maybe outbound from github might use a different domain.

I notice in the video that when Danielo goes into his brand new cloudant account, that there are already a couple of lines there. There are no entries in my database. Are we supposed to set up user accounts or tell the dashboard what the name of our notebook would be? It's certainly not in the video. Or do I need to set up a database at cloudant? Maybe Cloudant has even changed since Danielo started and now an extra step is required.

In any event, Firefox doesn't give me a chance to log in (the Offline button never changes). Neither does Chrome after the first attempt. This suggests there might be cookies somewhere that need to be reset. But which ones? I thought I could try it again in privacy mode, but Noteself doesn't like that all, throwing all sorts of yellow error boxes.

Mark

On Saturday, July 22, 2017 at 6:00:12 PM UTC-7, Arlen Beiler wrote:

Did you set CORS? CORS needs to be set to the URL you are using. I thought it gets set automatically, but maybe not. CORS is a setting in the Cloudant dashboard.

On Sat, Jul 22, 2017 at 8:52 PM, 'Mark S.' via TiddlyWiki <tiddl...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I've followed the directions and video as best I can to do an online Noteself. The problem is that it never logs into the cloudant database. The button says Offline. I click on the button and on Firefox nothing happens. I try it again on Chrome and I get a password and username box. I fill it out and submit. But it continues to say offline. I feel there is some missing magic step.

Thanks,
Mark

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[Mark S.]

OK, think I may have found the problem.

Cloudant doesn't accept mixed case names. I discovered this by attempting to create a database manually at the cloudant site. Probably these restrictions should be noted in the configuration panel.

Thanks,
Mark

[Mark S.]

Does Noteself use lazy loading of images? That is, if I load up a bunch of images, will it know not to send them all over when I log into a different browser?  And/or, will it load them every time the browser reloads?

Thanks,
Mark

[Mark S.]

How do I log out of Noteself? I can delete the database, but as soon as I (or someone else) reloads the page, everything is available again.

Thanks,
Mark

[Arlen Beiler]

Log out of the cloudant control panel. After that you will have to login every time you load the page.

So if you don't want to always be logging in, just stay logged into cloudant.

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[Mark S.]

In the case of Chrome, this meant I had to separately log in to Cloudant in order to log out (I had never directly logged in to Cloudant). It seems like for symmetry and peace of mind (think public kiosks) there ought to be a way to log out from Noteself.

Mark

On Sunday, July 23, 2017 at 3:57:35 AM UTC-7, Arlen Beiler wrote:

Log out of the cloudant control panel. After that you will have to login every time you load the page.

So if you don't want to always be logging in, just stay logged into cloudant.

On Jul 22, 2017 22:30, "'Mark S.' via TiddlyWiki" <tiddl...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

How do I log out of Noteself? I can delete the database, but as soon as I (or someone else) reloads the page, everything is available again.

Thanks,
Mark

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[JWHoneycutt]

I'm going to mirror Mark S.'s comments/troubles:

Whether in FireFox or Chrome, the OFFLINE button does not change to a cloud (in fact, I've never seen the checked cloud icon on my machine)

I do have a Cloudant account, but there are no databases listed there (and I don't know how to create one

My Cloudant account is named in all lower case (I think that's what Mark S. meant by "mixed case")

CORS is enabled, and I enabled EVERYTHING because I wasn't sure if the prior setting (now disappeared) was holding it back

In FireFox, clicking the OFFLINE button does absolutely nothing

In Chrome, clicking the OFFLINE button initially asked me to enter userID and password (with no result), and now, upon retrying, does nothing just like FireFox

I know Cloudant is about to merge with IBM's Bluemix (or something), and if it's anything like Amazon, it is a quagmire for newbies

Do I have to get a database listed in Cloudant before tomorrow, or is my sign-in sufficient to avoid bigger questions tomorrow?

JWHoneycutt

[JWHoneycutt]

And this is interesting (because I don't know what I am doing) -

I can add a tiddler in FireFox and it is there when I return to https://noteself.github.io/online/ in FireFox (but not in Chrome)

I can add a tiddler in Chrome and the new Chrome tiddler is there when I return to https://noteself.github.io/online/ in Chrome (but not in FireFox)

I suspect this browser specific feature would be gone if I could make NoteSelf sync online (the whole checked cloud icon issue)

Can I modify the Cloudant Dashboard from any browser? What should I add when I am there? Is it dangerous to leave CORS on all domains?

[JWHoneycutt]

 

How do I get to the CouchDB management interface? - I am trying to follow Lost Admin's original instructions above

I can get to the Cloudant Dashboard.

I downloaded the Apache CouchDB app, it is asking if i want to configure a single node or configure cluster (don't know), and wants Admin name, Admin PW, IP in 0.0.0.0 format and Port (that the node will use)

 

[JWHoneycutt]

OK, I figured something out (that I should have seen a long time ago)

I acquired the check cloud icon when I changed the name of my "Remote database name" on the GettingStarted tiddler to all lower case

Then the sync (gray check cloud icon) magically appears and Cloudant's dashboard has a dabase with documents!

[Mark S.]

That's what I said, or meant to say. I was using the same name for the database and the notebook, and when I changed to lowercase the system started working. I discovered the database naming requirements by attempting to first create the database from the Cloudant dashboard -- then it told me what the naming rules are, which I wouldn't have guessed otherwise.

Have fun,
Mark

[Arlen Beiler]

You would have directly logged in if you were doing anything in the dashboard. But other than that, I don't know. I have to log in every time. But I would use an incognito window so the local storage gets deleted if I was on a public computer. 

It would be neat if there were a version that didn't use local storage at all. This could be useful as I am usually online anyway.

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[Mark S.]

By incognito window, do you mean a private session? Because when I tried that NS threw all sorts of little yellow messages. My assumption is that private sessions are incompatible with local data storage, which kind of makes sense.

It also appears that you can't make an encrypted TW over NS. If there is some way to do this I would be very interested. My main objection to NS is that I have no more reason to trust cloudant than I do evernote. Less actually, since EN is aimed at individual persons whereas IBM is kind of aimed at big companies and projects. Also, cloudant seems experimental -- something that might disappear without warning and that is already morphing in front of our eyes. But EN doesn't encrypt (they have a kind of clunky encryption tool for sections of text). So if NS could encrypt, that would be a real advantage.

Mark

[Arlen Beiler]

In Chrome it is called incognito window and works fine, and only lasts until you close the window.

In Firefox, I think it might be called private session, not sure. Again, local storage should get deleted when you close the window, but maybe Firefox is different.

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[Mark S.]

On mine, when I try incognito mode on Chrome (Windows 7) I get the error:

PouchAdaptor - 20:20:16 23 7 2017

Login failed

(All in a yellow error box).

Mark

[Danielo Rodríguez]

I'm really sorry about the problems all of you are experiencing. I never suffered from any of those, therefore I never thought about ow to solve such problems. My intention was always to provide a service, not a tool. Users should only be required to login at NoteSelf service and nothing else , we will take care of all the behind the scenes (like any other service ). However I also wanted to provide a DIY option, and since that was the easiest I initially released that. Sandly I never had the time to implement the service, and that's why so many people is confused trying to try the DIY solution.
I still want to provide such service, but until that arrives I want to apologise for all those confused users.

Hope the community (and me from time to time in small spare time ) can help you to iron the path.

Sincerely

[Richard Campbell]

No worries - great ideas take time.  I think it's evident that there's a great deal of interest in a cloud-based tiddlywiki that has some aspects of user control. Having the data be in a cloud store "I" own is a great idea, just that it's non-trivial to do with the current set of cloud storage/database options. Seems like plenty of people here willing to help out, test out, and support this work.

[Eneko Gotzon]

On Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 1:50 AM, Richard Campbell <gne...@gmail.com> wrote:

Seems like plenty of people here willing to help out, test out, and support this work…

​Kind of wonderful guys crowd…

--

Eneko Gotzon Ares
eneko...@gmail.com

[Lost Admin]

Without CORS set, any website can use your Cloudant instance. However, the user using it would still need to have access to the database (note the default settings on a database is everyone has full access, including unauthenticated users). 

[Lost Admin]

The Apache CouchDB is what Cloudant is providing, You don't need both. If you are intending to host your own, then you wanted Apache CouchDB (I will assume this is what you wanted).

You want single node.

You want to set your admin name and admin password, this is your credetials as a CouchDB administrator/owner. Normally this would be a separate account from the one you use for your NoteSelf but it could be the same.

for IP, it depends on what you want...

IF you will only ever be using this from the computer that you install Apache CouchDB on, then put in "127.0.0.1", otherwise put in "0.0.0.0".

There should be a default port (5984), if you have to enter one, that is an okay choice unless you have a reason to change it.

 

[Lost Admin]

On Sunday, July 23, 2017 at 8:29:13 PM UTC-4, Mark S. wrote:

... My main objection to NS is that I have no more reason to trust cloudant than I do evernote. Less actually, since EN is aimed at individual persons whereas IBM is kind of aimed at big companies and projects. Also, cloudant seems experimental -- something that might disappear without warning and that is already morphing in front of our eyes. But EN doesn't encrypt (they have a kind of clunky encryption tool for sections of text). So if NS could encrypt, that would be a real advantage.

Mark

Cloudant was a dot-com built to provide CouchDB as a server (PaaS/IaaS). It was so successful that IBM bought it. We are seeing the result of that.

[Lost Admin]

On Monday, July 24, 2017 at 1:44:05 PM UTC-4, Danielo Rodríguez wrote:

I'm really sorry about the problems all of you are experiencing. I never suffered from any of those, therefore I never thought about ow to solve such problems.

I really don't think any of this is remotely your fault. You could not have predicted that IBM was going to buy out Cloudant and transform it so much. Most of these problems stem from how much IBM has changed things.

 

My intention was always to provide a service, not a tool. Users should only be required to login at NoteSelf service and nothing else , we will take care of all the behind the scenes (like any other service ). However I also wanted to provide a DIY option, and since that was the easiest I initially released that.

That's what I meant by "take NoteSelf to the next step" in another thread. I'm not in a position to maintain the cost of servers (well, not in the long run) and such but I am hoping to build around NoteSelf to include a sign-up (that would trigger all the back-end activities for CouchDB), password recovery, account deletion. I haven't had time to finish it either but I've almost got a publicly accessible CouchDB server working (although it's running on my home computer with a DHCP assigned address).

 

Sandly I never had the time to implement the service, and that's why so many people is confused trying to try the DIY solution.
I still want to provide such service, but until that arrives I want to apologise for all those confused users.

Hope the community (and me from time to time in small spare time ) can help you to iron the path.

Sincerely

I can't speak for the others, but you don't owe me an apology. The issues I've had were either my own lack of understanding (which, with your help, have mostly been corrected) and the sudden change to the Cloudant service (which was beyond your control).

[Mark S.]

Is it possible to allow NS to encrypt? That would be a great feature.

Mark

[Lost Admin]

I keep getting errors when I use the TiddlyWiki encryption functionality with NoteSelf. I haven't tracked down the cause.

I would also like to have it with NoteSelf.

[Mark S.]

I've recently upgraded to FF 54.0.1. When I go to

https://noteself.github.io/online/

I get the RSOE (red screen of embarrassment) and a couple yellow errors:

Error retrieving skinny tiddler list: TypeError: tiddlers is undefin

and

syncer-browser - 10:05:57 7 8 2017

Sync error while processing '$:/StoryList': {"status":500,"name":"indexed_db_went_bad","message":"unknown","reason":"Failed to open indexedDB, are you in private browsing mode?"}

I'm not in private browsing mode.

I thought it might be because I wasn't logged into cloudant, but logging in didn't seem to fix it. Noteself seems to work fine in Chrome. I also turned off my add-blocker on github and cloudant. I'm wondering if I need to go through the settings and delete all the noteself/cloudant cookies, or ??

Thanks,

Mark