Writing everything in TiddlyWiki and publishing just the public parts

I take all my notes in TiddlyWiki now, and publish most of them to my wiki .

For the past few years, I’ve published my wiki using TiddlyWiki. I write daily, publicly sharable notes there. Private stuff goes elsewhere…or did, until yesterday.

It’s the “elsewhere” part that drove me nuts. I have a private Roam database in which I would track things I don’t want to share. Or maybe I should write it in Org mode . Or Obsidian , or Craft , or or or. The difficult part for me has been that I want to take a note about, say, a new camera purchase. There are two components to it, the information about the camera itself, and information about the purchase. The former is public, the latter is private. This means I create one note in TiddlyWiki and one in, let’s say, Roam. There are dozens of examples like this, and it’s crazy-making. I thought I could manage this using links or copy/paste but it sucks trying to do that. I could also make everything public or private. Neither of these are feasible.

If only I could keep everything in one place, but only publish things I wanted public. Then, a few days ago, Soren Bjornstad came to the rescue with his video, A Tour Through My Zettelkasten .

Wow, other than building an amazing Zettelkasten, Soren has implemented nearly everything I needed in order to go all-in with TiddlyWiki for my own wiki.

A few highlights:

• Public and Private tiddlers
• Sensible tagging and organization
• Override the “copy permalink” feature to substitute public URL when on localhost
• Scripted rendering and publishing of public wiki
• Specific behavior when viewing public vs private editions
• A number of other nice touches

I borrowed some of these and integrated them into Rudimentary Lathe . Now, I’m taking all my notes in TiddyWiki. I’ll describe the process a little.

Editing the wiki locally.

I use TiddlyWiki as a local Node.js app. While one of TiddlyWiki’s great features is that can be just a single HTML file, running it locally as a single-page web app via node.js makes things a bit more flexible. Also, it’s the easiest way to allow for saving changes in Safari. The file structure looks like this:

├── files/
├── plugins/
├── tiddlers/
└── tiddlywiki.info

All tiddlers are kept as separate “.tld” files in the tiddlers folder. Here’s an example:

created: 20201220181044760
creator: jack
modified: 20210505182021507
modifier: jack
revision: 0
tags: Public
title: Leica APO-Summicron-SL 35mm ASPH
type: text/vnd.tiddlywiki

[img[files/2020/leica-apo-summicron-sl-35mm.jpg]]

I prefer primes, so this is the one I've chosen for the [[Leica SL2-S]]. Watching Peter Karbe admit it's is desert-island lens and suggesting it's the best lens Leica has ever produced made the decision a little easier.

I have over 2300 of them currently. Another nice side effect is that git diffs are much more usable on individual text files than on a giant HTML file.

Public vs Private content

Any tiddler I want to be public gets a “Public” tag. That’s it. The export script is smart enough to automatically include all system tiddlers, etc so that everything works.

As a useful helper, each tiddler displays a “Publish this tiddler” checkbox to make adding the tag easier, as well as serving as a handy indicator of private vs public status. The export script updates one of the configuration tiddlers so that the published version doesn’t show this checkbox.

I can’t tell you how huge this is. Not having to choose the tool or app for new notes is so liberating. I can now write and link freely with everything and can still share most of it publicly.

Hosting

I’ve never used Github Pages for hosting any content, so thought this would be a good opportunity to try it. Basically, I keep a separate repo of the public version and pushing to that repo automatically publishes it. Super easy to set up.

Publishing workflow

Soren was kind enough to share a version of the script for publishing his wiki (publish.sh), which I’ve modified slightly. Here are the highlights.

PRIV_FOLDER="rl-wiki"
PUB_FOLDER="public-wiki"

FILT='[is[system]] [tag[Public]] -[[$:/plugins/tiddlywiki/tiddlyweb]] -[[$:/plugins/tiddlywiki/filesystem]] -[prefix[$:/temp]] -[prefix[$:/state]] -[prefix[$:/sib/StorySaver/saved]] +[!field:title[$:/sib/WriteSideBar]]'

WIKI_NAME="index.html"ext_image_folder="extimage"

“FILT” is the tiddlywiki filter for determining which tiddlers to include (and exclude). The [tag[Public]] bit is the key to the public/private thing.

Then we export tiddlers based on the filter and settings above.

"$(npm bin)/tiddlywiki" "$PRIV_FOLDER" --savewikifolder "$pub_wiki" "$FILT"

Next, generate a single HTML version of the wiki and copy over the separate image files..

"$(npm bin)/tiddlywiki" "$pub_wiki" 
    --render "$:/core/save/all" "$WIKI_NAME" text/plaincp -r "$pub_wiki/output"/* "$pub_ghpages"cp -R "$PRIV_FOLDER/files" "$pub_ghpages"

Isn’t TiddlyWiki amazing!?

Finally, we commit and push the public wiki to Github…

if [ "$1" = "--push" ];
then
echo "Pushing compiled wiki to GitHub..."    
cd "$pub_ghpages" || exit 1    
git add .    
git commit -m "publish checkpoint"    
git push
else    
echo "Not pushing the wiki to GitHub because the --push switch was not provided."
fi

And voilà!

A few nice odds and ends.

Soren’s “Reference Explorer”, seen at the bottom of individual tiddlers, replaces my handmade backlinks display. His is much fancier. I removed a few tabs I don’t use, and may exclude the tags at some point. I conditionally exclude the explorer from my Daily Notes pages. (anything tagged “DailyNote” hides the explorer.) Another nice tweak is that if I add a “refexplorer-hide” field to any tiddler and set it to “true”, the explorer is not shown on that tiddler. Nifty.

TiddlyWiki comes with a button for copying a permalink to each tiddler. The problem with that for me is that when I’m running the wiki locally, permalinks look like this

http://localhost:8080/#CommandLineInterface, which obviously won’t work. Soren’s version of the button replaces localhost:8080 with the live hostname, e.g. https://rudimentarylathe.wiki/#CommandLineInterface . This saves me a ton of copy/paste/edit hassles.

Putting it all together.

When I’m ready to publish, I open a terminal and type prl (for “publish rudimentary lathe”)

prl is a script…

#!/bin/sh
cd ~/Sync/rudimentarylathe./scripts/publish.sh --push

That’s it.

I wish more people would spend time getting to know TiddlyWiki. It’s amazing. It’s a Quine , which makes it ridiculously flexible and powerful. And yet it’s very simple. It’s also a free, local-first, easily-distributable, storable, backup-able single HTML file.

TiddlyWiki is fun, fancy, and
future-proof. I live there now.

May 8, 2021 Software Writing Reply by email