WHitWoT #6 (Feb 6-12, 2008)

Welcome to the 6th edition of "What Happened in the World of TiddlyWiki", or WHitWoT for short. WHitWoT summarises what's happened lately on the TiddlyWiki mailing list and elsewhere in the TiddlyWiki world.

This edition includes stories from ocalTW, WHitWoT's first contributing editor! If you want to be a contributor to WHitWoT like ocalTW, please contact Daniel at this email address: whitwot at gmail, then a dot, then com.

News and Stuff

Make your dates prettier!

Simon Baird announced a new plugin, PrettyDatesPlugin. It's basically a wrapup of some JavaScript by John Resig to turn "Jan 3 2008" into "two weeks ago". That's what you really want to know anyway, right?

This would have featured in WHitWoT earlier, but the conversation about alternate names (SmartDates, SexyDates, RelativeDates..) went on for ages :)

[source] http://prettydatesplugin.tiddlyspot.com/
[thread] http://groups.google.com/group/TiddlyWiki/browse_thread/thread/a7e9fa7e9dd8b378

FND joins Osmosoft

Osmosoft is the little branch of BT that cares about TiddlyWiki, and they've just hired on FND, who is responsible for many answers on the TW mailing list and most of the wiki at tiddlywiki.org.

Hopefully some remuneration will let FND keep up the work he puts into the TiddlyWiki community.

[osmosoft] http://osmosoft.com
[thread] http://groups.google.com/group/TiddlyWiki/browse_thread/thread/ae313576850dc365

Gracefully shorten URLs

FND also found time to produce a little plugin that overrides the way TiddlyWiki displays URLs. The ShortURLPlugin snips out the middle of any superlong URLs when they are shown on screen (without changing the URL the link actually goes to). If your nice layout gets ruined by long URLs, check it out.

[source] http://fnd.lewcid.org/tmp/ShortURLPlugin.html
[thread] http://groups.google.com/group/TiddlyWiki/browse_thread/thread/e356a266c2739817

Online Discussions

Saving to tiddlyspot from Prism

Weidner asked if anyone had success uploading to tiddlyspot.com using Prism[1]. No answers for this one.. has anyone saved to an UploadPlugin site from Prism?

[thread] http://groups.google.com/group/TiddlyWiki/browse_thread/thread/bd8e3d883e88dbac
[1] http://wiki.mozilla.org/Prism

Make a link into your bug database with this: <<bug>>

Prompted by a request from Harshad, resident guru Eric Shulman explains how to use the AliasPlugin[2] to easily make links like this:
http://bugzilla.mysite.com/bug_id=100
..by just typing the bug number like this:
<<bug>>

[thread] http://groups.google.com/group/TiddlyWiki/browse_thread/thread/184537f4222b8783
[2] http://www.tiddlytools.com/#AliasPlugin

Scheduling backups of a tiddlyspot site

(by ocalTW)

XENO wanted a free solution on Windows to schedule a backup of his tiddlyspot site. The proposed solution was to use Microsoft Scheduled Tasks[3] and Wget [4].
Nevertheless, a security issue was raised, as the username and password must be written in plain text in the command line that is scheduled.
Simon Baird also suggested downloading the http://USERNAME.tiddlyspot.com/download page.
An open question was how to check that a change had been made on the TiddlyWiki page. As Bob Paige remarked, if it doesn't change often, excessive backups would be causing extra traffic for no reason.

[thread] http://groups.google.com/group/TiddlyWiki/browse_thread/thread/9bcc7ea0c3cc515e/0effad86c3ee9718
[3] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308569
[4] http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm

Quick Shots

Postdrivel

Thank you to contributing editor ocalTW, who actually wrote up three articles for this issue of WHitWoT, but thanks to a difference in timezone, two of them actually fall into next issue's date range. For issue #7 I plan to standardise on GMT (currently WHitWoT dates are in my local timezone of GMT+10).

If you'd like to lend a hand preparing WHitWoT, please email me at gmail.com, username whitwot and let me know.

;Daniel

About WHitWoT

WHitWoT is distilled from the social wisdom of the TiddlyWiki Google Group by Daniel Baird and others. Daniel is a long time TiddlyWiki fan, runs tiddlyspot.com along with Simon of MonkeyGTD and MPTW fame, and wonders if his one line contribution to the core code is still there.

Find (and subscribe to) WHitWoT at Daniel's blog:
http://blog.deuceofalltrades.com/search/label/WHitWoT
..and posted ocasionally at the TiddlyWiki Google Group:
http://groups.google.com/group/TiddlyWiki

deuce of all trades

WHitWoT #6 (Feb 6-12, 2008)