Episode: 274
Title: HPR0274: TiddlyWiki
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0274/hpr0274.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 15:22:26

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The end of the day.
Hi, my name is Gordon Zincler, my handle on the IRC is Thistleweb. In this hacker
public radio episode I'm going to talk to you about a little program called
Tidley Wickey. Now first of all it's important to point out what it is as well as
what it's not because when people hear Wickey they expect certain things. They
expect, first of all, that it's server-based, that it's on a website somewhere. It might
be an internal internet site or it may be a public, publicly accessible website. They
expect it to have a database to store all its data. They expect it to be to have
multiple users, where multiple users can collaborate on an essentially a
website, make edits, add things, delete things and for that it needs some sort of
revision control as well so that you can see who has added what and revert back to
previous versions and whatever. Well, Tidley Wickey is not that, despite
the name Wickey it's none of that. First of all, Tidley Wickey is a fully
self-contained single HTML file. That's it, it's an HTML file. It has inline
JavaScript and inline CSS for the functionality and the the loop in the
field, you know, the layout on the screen. It's Gecko-based so it works, it's
designed to work well with essentially the Mozilla family, so Firefox,
Floor, C-Monkey, so and Bill, I don't know if there are any other Mozilla
browsers, but it does work with other browsers as well. Opera works just fine, but
you do need to have an additional Tidley saver.jar file, the Java file
to save, otherwise you won't be able to save your changes. So, what is Tidley
Wickey sort of best suited for if it's not one of these traditional Wickey? I
find there are a few reasons that it's like a few places where it comes in
really handy. It's an ideal personal Wickey that you can take anywhere with
you in a thumb drive. It's a single HTML file. It is copied that across on the
your thumb drive and take it with you, open up at work, school, take notes, you
know, in a meeting, take notes. It's ideal for that. It's an ideal scratch pad for
ideas on a project. You can create a Wickey for a client if you're
proposing to do something for them. You can create a Wickey with all your
different ideas and then zip it and email them in so that they can then open
it up in their web browser and see what you're proposing. The other thing
that's quite interesting about it is it's got a journal feature built in. So, you
can create a new Tidley saver, which I'll get to a bit later on, or a new
journal. A journal entry is basically a new Tidler who are starting with the
date and time. So, you can have a journal entry for things that you wouldn't
want public to see. It's more like a diary than anything else. What I had
envisioned doing is starting a journal, which I never thought I would do. And have
a clean Wickey each month, a new fresh Wickey file each month, and then
put the previous month into a tar.gz file and then archive it. Each month may
be excessive. I'll see how that goes. It might be a little once a year would be
for that. I have like a 2009 journal and then a 2010. So, and then have these
available in my will for people who are interested in reading them. So, that's
what you can use a Tidley Wickey for. There are other variants as well and there's
other alternatives to Tidley Wickey. There's variants like B3 cubed, and there's
monkey something as well. And these are like what I would call GTD variants. They're
get things done variants. They add things like reminders, calendar, plugins. They
are Tidley Wickeys with certain plugins already pre-installed. You can
certainly use them. I have no need for any of that sort of the more advanced
things, but by all means I'll include notes, I'll include links to these to check
them out. I'm only using the basic Tidley Wickey. The other alternatives, there's
two main ones that sort of stick out. There is Tidley Wickey, which, according to
Wickey, the Tidley Wickey home page, project home page is now being domain
part. So, I don't know if they are, if that sort of stalled, I don't know. It's in the Ubuntu
Repos. I believe, or certainly, it's in where I first heard about it, it was on
Populinx. That's their default note taker in Populinx. I thought that was a little bit limited,
but that could be just because I didn't understand anything about Wickeys at the time that I
played with that. I don't think it's being updated now, and I don't think it's that universal
either. I don't think you can get it. I don't think it's going to work on any other platforms.
The Wickey page that I'm linking to does have a link to the .deb file. The other one is Wickey
on a stick, which I think is just a brilliant name for a project. The Wickey on a stick is
the same idea, a very similar idea. It also uses Tidley saver.jar file to save. I wasn't sure
about how that looked, but that again is probably down in my lack of knowledge of the project.
That's the refuel alternatives anyway. You're not just stuck with the default. You can also
put install various plugins and themes. That's how things like B3 cubed came about. It's just
Tidley Wickey with a different theme and different plugins already pre-installed.
With Tidley Wickey, you have a backstage area. The backstage area is a little
initially, it's a little closed button on the top right hand side of the top right hand corner
of the page. That opens a horizontal menu with options to sync to another install of Tidley
Wickey to install themed import, Tidley Lersh to configure plugins etc.
What are Tidley Lersh? Tidley Lersh are your content. Tidley Lersh are also the plugins.
Tidley Lersh consists of three things. They consist of a title, a body and tags.
Now, title, like a blog, title is the only one that's required because that's what links to
the body and the tags are optional. To install plugins, you find the plugin page,
the URL of the plugin you want to install, copy and create a new titler.
Copy and paste the code from that page into the body of the new titler. You can name it whatever
you want. It's easier to name it the same as the plugin name, as that way it avoids confusion.
And just make sure if you're installing a plugin, remember to call it to tag it as system
config, which is the smallest capital C. When you then save it and restart, or save it and
refresh it browser, because you've tagged it as system config, that tells Tidley Wickey to
execute the JavaScript, not just run it, and at that point your plugin will be installed.
Now, themes, I don't like the default theme that Tidley Wickey comes with, the blue and white
theme, I don't like that. I use a theme called Blackicity, which is available from TidleyThemes.com.
I'll include the link to that in the show notes as well. The install and a theme, you can do two
different ways, because it's in line. What you're doing basically is the CSS is inside the same
HTML file. So you overwrite your current theme with your new theme, that's how to install it.
You can, there is a plugin that allows you to have multiple themes and then switch between them
without having to do that. I've not tried that, so I don't know how that works. Another note is
well on something that people might be interested in, is the fact that there's no passwords or
no encryption by default. They are available with plugins, but they're not there by default.
So if you're doing a journal, you might have to look at other ways to make it private.
To import a theme, essentially on a page like TidleyThemes.com, there's two different links for each
theme. There's a demo and there's details. The demo obviously does what it says, it gives you
a live version of that theme in action. The details link opens up more information and there you'll
find a link, which is right-click, and copy the link location and import it from the backstage.
When you import it and it'll find all the different elements to the theme and the main part you
want is the CSS part. It'll override your current CSS and give you the new theme. The theme will
change instantly. The other way to some parts of these themes, depending on what the themes are,
they may have a JPEG header or images for the unordered list or whatever. So remember to get
them as well if they are part of your theme. The other way to do themes is to
you can download an empty Tidley wiki HTML file with that theme already installed.
That's quite useful. Obviously at that point you have an empty file, you have none of your
Tidlars none of your data. You can then open up that empty file and then import from file this time
and import your Tidlars from your file. Just remember it's select all your Tidlars
and which ones to import. And remember not to import the CSS because that'll import your old file
and you'll be back to square one again. So you can have what I do is I've got a separate
wiki for each project that I do. I've got them in separate folders. I've Tidley wiki for
the HPR show notes that I'm looking at just now. I've got that in a folder in my documents folder
in another folder called HPR. And the reason for that is because by default Tidley wiki
creates backups. Every time you save it it creates backups. And that can fill up your
will not fill up your date, your space because I mean there's a lot of space to spare
and the art of the art small files. But it just gets a bit messy. So I have them in an
separate folder, each one on a separate folder. You can rename your empty.empty-tidleywiki.html
to anything you want it doesn't matter. The details for some of the configuration stuff are in the
cookies as well. So just keep that in mind that you have to allow JavaScript and you have to allow cookies.
The next part here is about upgrading. You're not just stuck with the same version of Tidley wiki
if there's an exploit or something. You can easily upgrade it. Again that's done from the backstage
area. There's an easy update option. It's very quick and very painless. You can sync as well.
You can sync Tidley wiki to a different PC. So you can work off line if you can't get on
the internet. You still need to work away. You can work on a like a local version of your wiki.
And then when you've got it on access again you can sync it to another machine in your network
or on another on a website somewhere. And speaking of that there's a free Tidley wiki hosting
at tidleyspot.com which I'll include in the show notes as well. Tidley spot you can create a free
account there like mywiki.tidleyspot.com or whatever. And that can also be set to be private as well.
So I mean you can sync here. You're downloaded, you're your local file with with that one.
So I think I've covered quite a lot of Tidley wiki. There's obviously a lot more to it
that I've not covered. First of all I'm not used to wiki software. Wiki stuff isn't new to me.
So in every wiki software has its own syntax. And I've found that Tidley wiki seems to be,
I mean I think in fairness I think they're all pretty easy to pick up. And there's certainly plenty
online documentation, online guides for how to do a link to a file or you know a link to an image
or all this kind of stuff and on order lists and things. So it's not that difficult to learn.
And I've certainly been very impressed with it for as a note taker which is what I wanted
it for. The whole reason I looked into this and found Tidley wiki was because I have an old
computer, it's a it's a Pentium 4, it's 256 meg of RAM which is this fine, it's great for
for what I need it to do. Yes it's limited, it's not a super computer by any any stretch of
imagination. But it's fine for for what I need. I'm learning web design, I'm doing that in
Drupal and WordPress and experimenting with like PHP, BB and whatever. But all of these are on
like a local lamp server on my desktop that I can I need to switch on and off when I want to use
it. Because it just takes up too much resources to sit there when I'm not actually working with
it. For that for me to have a traditional wiki on a server, sure I could do that, I could put it
on the lamp server, it just takes like five, six, seven seconds for the server to start up
before I can start doing everything and it takes up a decent chunk of my resources just to run
the server. That's why I wanted one that didn't need a server and that's that's where I stumbled
on on Tidley wiki. The other point that I've just remembered about Diddy wiki as an alternate
is that Diddy wiki requires you to open a port to run which is fine if you're the if you've
got admin rights on the system you're on and you can open the port, that's fine. But if you're
at college, school, work, whatever and you're just a user on that machine and the ports are locked
you are blocked and you can't you can't open them. Well, you're your personal wiki or your notes,
all your plans of all this of all this disappear. You can't use your can't use your wiki which is
another reason to use either Tidley wiki or wiki on a stick. So I think I've probably
rambled a bit too much and I do apologise. So I'm going to call it a night there and
and that'll be it. So my name is Gordon Sinclair, my IRC handle is Thistleweb. If you want to contact
me by email it's Thistle.Webcast at googlemail.com. And until next time, goodbye.