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Ouch.

This is still a bit of a hack. In an ideal world, clicking the save button should just give you a file save dialogue box and let you choose where to save your spanking new personal TiddlyWiki. Unfortunately doing stuff in web browsers is never that easy, and there's a couple of hoops to be jumped through. See below for a quick guide.



The steps to save your changes as a new, standalone TiddlyWiki are simple, but can be error prone.

1. Make sure that all the text is selected in the edit box above. Copy it to the clipboard.
2. Go back to the browser window showing your editted TiddlyWiki and save the HTML as a new file.
3. Open the HTML file in a text editor like Notepad. Scroll to the bottom and locate the marker lines picked out with a row of asterisks.
4. Select the text from just above that marker back up to the previous marker.
5. Paste the new text in.
6. Save the HTML file.
Suggestions or improvements welcome.

My email address is jeremy (at) osmosoft (dot) com
TiddlyWiki
a reusable non-linear personal web notebook
Hopefully, reading a TiddlyWiki is fairly self explanatory. Within the main story column, click on bold links to read a linked tiddler. Click on italic links to create a new tiddler. When you hover the mouse over a tiddler it's highlighted and some extra options appear by the title: 'close' just closes the tiddler in question, 'link' does the opposite by closing all other tiddlers. Finally, 'edit' allows you to edit the text of any tiddler; changes are not reflected back to the server, though. See SavingStuff for more details.
There's no funky ServerSide to TiddlyWiki yet; I'm just posting up a single, static HTML file. As a consequence it is impossible to permanently save changes to a TiddlyWiki back to the web server. Instead, you have to manually save changes using the 'Save all' link at the top right.
A TiddlyWiki is like a blog because it's divided up into neat little chunks, but it encourages you to read it by hyperlinking rather than sequentially: if you like, a non-linear blog analogue that binds the individual microcontent items into a cohesive whole. I think that TiddlyWiki represents a novel medium for writing, and will promote it's own distinctive WritingStyle. This is the first version of TiddlyWiki and so, as discussed in TiddlyWikiDev, it's bound to be FullOfBugs, have many MissingFeatures and fail to meet all of the DesignGoals. And of course there's NoWarranty, and it might be judged a StupidName.
You can fairly easily take this TiddlyWiki, put in your own content and distribute it by email or by posting it on a web site. Anyway, to get your own content together all you need to do is CreateTiddlers, EditTiddlers and DeleteTiddlers. Then click the 'Save all' link at the top right of the page, and follow the instructions (glossing over the SkeletonInTheCloset). And, hey presto, you've got your own self contained TiddlyWiki. I'll try to collect OtherTiddlyWikis here, so do please EmailMe and let me know if you use it.
The new SiteDesign is the work of my friend RebeccaWelby of Bysm. My clumsy CSS doesn't really do justice to her skills; see the Bysm site at http://www.bysm.co.uk for more of her work.
The references button displays all the tiddlers that link to a particular tiddler. It appears on a little toolbar when you move the mouse over any tiddler that is not being editted. This is one of the NewFeatures that has been requested a couple of times, and does indeed make it a lot easier to explore a TiddlyWiki.
When you type more than three characters in the search box at the upper right, any matching tiddlers are automatically displayed with the text highlighted. There's a couple of minor problems, though: the highlights don't get removed when you clear the search, and occasionally, on some browsers, keystrokes get missed so you have to click the 'search' button to manually trigger the search. Of all the NewFeatures, this was the most troublesome to implement; the intricate complexities and interactions of my JavaScript wikify() and subWikify() functions that do the search term highlighting had me tearing my hair out.
This is maybe the only one of the NewFeatures that might be vaguely original. It's a button in the right-hand sidebar that sets the browser address bar to a URL embodying all the currently open tiddlers in the order that they are currently shown. To use it, arrange the open tiddlers that you want, click the permaview button, copy the URL from the browser address bar, and then paste it into an email, web page or whatever.
The permalink button is more of a fixed feature than one of the NewFeatures. It gives you a link back to a particular tiddler within TiddlyWiki, just like a permalink for a blog entry.
Another of the more frequently requested NewFeatures, the 'close all' button in the right-hand sidebar just closes all the currently open tiddlers.
The sidebar now features a tab control to switch between a timeline and alphabetic view of all the open tiddlers. I have plans for more tabs that will offer further navigation methods.
The close button appears when the mouse is over a tiddler; it just closes the tiddler in question, now accompanied by a little animation to make it clearer what's going on.
TiddlyWiki uses several special tiddlers to hold the text used for the MainMenu, the SiteTitle and the SiteSubtitle. DefaultTiddlers is used to store the titles of the tiddlers that are shown at startup. Go ahead and edit them and see the results.
When it loads, TiddlyWiki looks for the names of tiddlers to open as a space-separated list after the # in the URL. If there are no tiddlers in the URL it instead loads the tiddlers named in DefaultTiddlers, one of the SpecialTiddlers.
This SecondVersion of TiddlyWiki adds IncrementalSearch, the ReferencesButton, the PermaLinkButton, PermaView, CloseAll, SmoothScrolling, an ImprovedSidebar, an animation for the CloseButton and last but not least a tiny EasterEgg in homage to Macintosh OS X. I've also changed the ReadingExperience and the StartupBehaviour.
This is an improved version of TiddlyWiki, with several NewFeatures, BugFixes, a new SiteDesign and the OldFeatures still present and correct. It still doesn't have a ServerSide, by far the most requested feature, so SavingStuff is still troublesome. I do have a ServerSide under development which I'll finish when I get EnoughTime, but in the meantime there are several interesting OtherTiddlyWikis that do allow saving already.
Try holding down the shift key while clicking on a link to a tiddler, or on the CloseButton for a tiddler. Kind of a respectful homage to Mac OS X, which does something similar for many of its system animations. (On browsers like InternetExplorer that use the shift key to open a new window, you can use the alt key instead).
If you click on a link to a tiddler that is already open, TiddlyWiki will if necessary now smoothly scroll to bring it into view. This is one of the NewFeatures that actually isn't so new at all; I took it out at the last minute before the first release because it was ridiculously buggy. (And now I've just found out it was still broken on InternetExplorer in the first revision of this SecondVersion; I'm hoping it's now finally fixed).
HelloThere NewFeatures RecentStuff
HelloThere RecentStuff UsingThisSite ReusingThisSite AdaptingThisSite NewFeatures TiddlyWiki TiddlyWikiDev Copyright 2005 JeremyRuston
I'm Jeremy Ruston, a technologist based in London. I do consultancy work through my company Osmosoft at http://www.osmosoft.com, as well as pursuing some independent projects like TiddlyWiki. If you've got any comments or suggestions on this site, do please EmailMe.
This is the SecondVersion of TiddlyWiki. It has been superseded by the ThirdVersion at http://www.tiddlywiki.com