Bobbing for Tiddlers: Wading into TW5 on BobEXE

[Scott Simmons (Secret-HQ)]

Instead of admiring Jed's work from afar, I'm finally joining the cool kids in wading into his TW5 BobEXE edition (implementation?).

Having never used TW5 on Node.js beyond the initial setup, I'm having to grapple with the concepts of a server-based TW again and get used to some of the differences.  So I thought I'd create a thread here for my newbie questions and discussion.  It may end up a junk drawer of conversation, but hopefully it will record some of my confusion and point others who come after me in the right direction.

1.  Is there a good general reference/tutorial for getting started with Bob?  The best I've found has been Jed's gentle, step-by-step prodding through the tiddlers in his edition  But I had to decide I wanted to try the BobEXE version, find it, and run the executable before I got into those.  (Fellow noobs, if you don't have the .exe file yet, start with the ReadMe here:  https://github.com/OokTech/TW5-Bob )

2.  Is there a configuration option to disable the launching of the default Ooktech/Bob TiddlyWik when the bob.exe starts up?  I find I'm crashing the server a lot during my initial setup, exploration, and import of tiddlers.  It would be nice not to have to close additional instances of the "BobHub" page every time I restart the .exe.

3.  Is there a configuration option (or hack, even?) to point the .exe to a different path?  (E.g,, could I keep the .exe in /ProgramFiles on my C:\ drive and my related folders in /TiddlyWikis on my D:\ drive?)

3a.  One reason I ask about this is I like keeping TWs in a folder that syncs to my cloud storage account, but that storage service doesn't like having .exes running in a location it's trying to sync.  Any insights on this from any Bob users.  (This leads directly to my next question.)

4.  What's the best strategy for backing up Bob-based wikis?  Just synchronizing your /Wikis folder to another location?

5.  What's up with those .meta tiddlers Bob sometimes creates?  At first, I thought that's how it was keeping track of as-yet-unsaved changes to tiddlers, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

6.  A higher-level (and hopefully simpler) question:  What are the advantages of using a Bob-powered wiki over the single HTML file?

Related to that last question:  I have some old TiddlyWiki Classics where I dumped the contents of reference articles to make them easily sortable and cross-linkable, but once that hit a certain size, I started breaking the articles out into related TWs because the load and save times got ridiculous.  Nowadays I'm starting to keep detailed "how to" TWs to remind me of procedures and settings, but they too can get large.  Am I right to hope Bob, by virtue of not having to parse all the HTML of every tiddler every time it loads or saves, might make TWs with lots of large tiddlers more feasible to work with?

That's — a lot for one post, isn't it?  I'm hoping some of these have a complete answers elsewhere in the group or around the Web and some kind soul will post links to existing discussions or documentation.

[Jed Carty]

Going through things in order, at least the ones that I have something to say on:

1 - I haven't seen any. Eventually I my get around to making something.

2 - If you set 'suppressBrowser' to true in settings.json it will not try to open up the browser automatically. See here: https://github.com/OokTech/TW5-Bob/blob/master/Configuration.md

3 - You can set the location of everything but the root wiki by setting the wikisPath setting in the configuration, same link as above. It can be absolute or relative, if it is relative it is relative to where the executable is.

     Changing the location of the index wiki isn't currently possible because the settings are stored in the index wiki and Bob can't load the settings without knowing here they are, so using BobEXE it uses the same

     index wiki location  all the time. The plugin version lets you change this, but people seem to find that harder to set up and use. I will add an issue to look at using a command line argument to set the location of 

     the index wiki.

  3a - Be careful about syncing the tiddlers, you can have Bob and the syncing fight over changes to tiddlers. And if you have multiple Bob instances editing the same wiki and syncing going on it can get worse.

4 - I don't know about best, but I periodically zip the full wikis folder. Eventually I will get around to making an automated back-up for Bob.

5 - .meta files are created by the core server. They are created for any tiddler that isn't a normal .tid file, like images

6 - The readme has an incomplete list of features that I think can be improvements in the contexts where I use tiddlywiki. The biggest for me are:

  - I can open the same wiki in multiple tabs or on multiple computers without worrying about overwriting my edits

  - I can create new wikis easily form within a wiki

  - I can manage many wikis (I currently have over 50 wikis managed using Bob on my work laptop)

  - I can use Bob with lots of plugins for editing a wiki and then export a single file version of the wiki without any of the plugins included

for the last bit, saving can be much much faster using Bob, loading may not necessarily be any faster. But one benefit of Bob is that you can have many wikis and have them all easily accessible to each other using a tab in the sidebar, so splitting big wikis into smaller more manageable wikis is a viable option, for me at least.

[Scott Simmons (Secret-HQ)]

Jed!

Thanks for chiming in with responses.

On Sunday, October 20, 2019 at 4:51:23 PM UTC-4, Jed Carty wrote:

1 - I haven't seen any. Eventually I my get around to making something.

The included TiddlyWiki itself is pretty helpful and seems it would be the ideal place for more documentation.  (Though a YouTube tutorial or an export of documentation to a standalone TW would always be welcome.)  For what that's worth.  ;)

 

2 - If you set 'suppressBrowser' to true in settings.json it will not try to open up the browser automatically. See here: https://github.com/OokTech/TW5-Bob/blob/master/Configuration.md

Perfect!  Thanks for the detailed list of values, as well — which led into my next question .,..

 

3 - You can set the location of everything but the root wiki by setting the wikisPath setting in the configuration

 

  3a - Be careful about syncing the tiddlers, you can have Bob and the syncing fight over changes to tiddlers. And if you have multiple Bob instances editing the same wiki and syncing going on it can get worse.

 

4 - I don't know about best, but I periodically zip the full wikis folder. Eventually I will get around to making an automated back-up for Bob.

Good point about the conflict with the /Wikis files themselves.  For now, I think my backup strategy is going to be working outside of the cloud folder, then syncing my whole Bob folder (minus the .exe) to a subfolder in the cloud folder.

Long-term, an internal backup mechanism for individual tiddlers (allowing the user to roll back, perhaps from the BobHub) would be awesome.  But so would an edition that comes with free ice cream.  ;)  Writing some kind of management for such a backup would be a project of its own, I imagine.

5 - .meta files are created by the core server. They are created for any tiddler that isn't a normal .tid file, like images

Huh.  Any idea what they actually do?

 

6 - The readme has an incomplete list of features that I think can be improvements in the contexts where I use tiddlywiki

The possibilities for sharing, bundling, and trimming are certainly intriguing.  Also the possibilities for collaboration on the local network (which I may never get to take advantage of, but they're still intriguiing!)

========

At the moment, I'm still working on getting a TiddlyWiki's worth of tiddlers into a new Bob wiki.  I've been breaking down my imports into small .JSON bundles to find which tiddler(s) is causing the problem, but at some point, Bob crashes out, and I'm left with a broken wiki.

I've tried deleting the imported tiddlers manually, but that doesn't seem to help, and the tiddlywiki.info doesnt seem to have changed since it was created.  Not sure there's anything else I can roll back to the pre-broken state.  So, for the moment, I'm just creating new BobWikis and importing Big-JSON-block-that-works then smaller-JSON-block-that-breaks-it, trying to figure out what in my existing tiddlers is throwing a spanner into the works.