Osmosoft.com site re-launched with TiddlyWiki
July 4th, 2007
I recently commented on the fun I was having repurposing a TiddlyWiki to be the new Osmosoft website. I’m pleased to say that the site is now live.
The fun thing is, that here at Osmosoft we like the open source approach, and that even extends to our website. We invite anyone to offer improvements to the site, and since it is built using TiddlyWiki it is easy for you to grab the code with a quick File > Save As and then you can set about making whatever changes you like, right from within the site. Confused? Well it took me a little while to come to grips with this way of working, and it is becoming apparent that I have just uncovered the tip of the iceberg, but once you get started, this way of working can be really fun and can be very efficient.
The magic happens thanks to the Javascript tucked away inside the TiddlyWiki (and by ‘tucked away’, I really mean that it is there, bold as brass, for you to inspect and should the mood take you, modify). TiddlyWiki holds its’ content in blobs called ‘Tiddlers’. These can hold plain text, Wikitext, HTML, CSS or Javascript and you can edit the Tiddlers from within the browser. When you finish editing a Tiddler, TiddlyWiki goes to work. It interprets the content of the tiddler and updates the browser accordingly. You can use this method not only to manage your content, but also to style the site by extending the CSS definitions. Take a look at the StyleSheet tiddler on Osmosoft.com to see an example.
I’ll be blogging more as I uncover more of the delights of TiddlyWiki. It is proving to be extremely flexible and extensible.
“We invite anyone to offer improvements to the site, and since it is built using TiddlyWiki it is easy for you to grab the code with a quick File > Save As and then you can set about making whatever changes you like, right from within the site.”
Just a heads up. Using the file dialog in a browser to save a TiddlyWiki will corrupt the file. In firefox you can drag the url to the download box. Or you need to right click on a link to the file and save with “Save Target As”.
[…] on from some previous work re-branding the Osmosoft.com website, we have now discovered that we can take a slightly different […]
I wanted to let you know that the Hawk TiddlyTheme is gorgeous, superb, brilliant. I like the navigation on the left, the tags on the right creating a narrower content column - and I like the index and options appearing at the bottom. The tags image is really nice. I’m feeling a little Barbie with the pink/fuschia so maybe I’ll change that to orange/red/or retro green, but I love it. You are marvelous!
Wow! Thanks Philip! I’m hoping to get some more themes finished off and published on TiddlyThemes soon. Now that TiddlyWiki supports themes defined i a single tiddler, it will become even easier to import and switch themes. I’ll look out for your developments. Phil
At this time I am mainly ramping up with Aptana Jaxer. I did have a little personal wiki up which I had been hosting using Helma/Gobi but I am going to switch to TiddlyWiki. I just want something low maintenance for now. I tend to prefer writing code to blogging and so microcontent certainly does work for me.
I noticed at work using IE 7 that the left sidebar in the Hawk theme is not visible. I’m just writing to see if you’ve seen this issue and maybe what the cause is. You can email me if you’d like - I’m not certain what your email address is.
Thanks, Phil Weaver
The initial stage of my TiddlyWiki is up at philmaker.com. I also setup the WebDavPlugin to connect to my Apache server - it’s quite nice.