February 2011
1 post
“Curiously, when designing systems for what can be called the artifact world —...”
– Intended Unintended Consequences
December 2010
1 post
“Overall, however, the result of all the work is a pretty fine piece of kit....”
– TiddlySpace EOY
November 2010
2 posts
“One of the ways in which we learn, usually learning the most important stuff, is...”
– TiddlySpaceIdentity
“We determine the world we are building by the tools we choose to create. Do we...”
– TiddlySpace - The Unix Way and I
October 2010
3 posts
A Water Cooler on Every Desk
I’m beginning to think that the enterprise 2.0 concept of moving activity and information sharing styles like Twitter and Facebook into the workplace is based on a flawed concept or assemblage of concepts.
We’re all familiar with the idea that knowledge workers do their work around the water cooler: Picking up what they need to know via their network of friends and connections.
And...
1 tag
Bye Bye Facebook, Hello TiddlySpace
I’ve long had a problem with Twitter and Facebook. They clearly do awesome things, allowing people to communicate in many great ways, but they get in my craw: They end up being a disturbing combination of TV and High School; a race to the bottom where lie the spammers, the advertisers, the popular wit, the need to consume and the need to capitalize and control. The glorious potential of a...
Xtreme Religion
Some time ago I called myself an information theologist.
I spend a lot of time thinking about what motivates people to do work. In the BlueOxen days we discussed that collaboration required SharedLanguage that led to SharedUnderstandings that led to SharedGoals which result in stuff happening.
This all remains true but I think there’s a step at the end which deserves more attention. When...
September 2010
1 post
1 tag
Wikiness
A cut from a google groups posting about TiddlySpace:
The advent of wikipedia has meant that recent aspirants to the wiki
way have a sense that a wiki is a reference, an information resource,
which has evolved out of the concerted effort of many editors.
That’s a great thing, but it’s not a wiki.
A wiki is a synthesis engine. A tool in a community. It allows an
individual or...
July 2010
1 post
2 tags
Granularity
Or Purple Will Rise Again!
I went to the London Wiki Wednesday yesterday. Jeremy gave an overview of TiddlySpace. Afterwards there was some discussion of how it is different from other so-called collaboration platforms (Sharepoint being one of the examples of things that do it wrong compared with TiddlySpace’s version of right). I suggested that the difference can be discovered by thinking...
May 2010
2 posts
As I May Work
On the occasion of relocating home to places more rural and secluded as allowed by the memex.
My job description, for the last twenty years or so, has been primarily concerned with the creation of hardware and software systems. My work product, however, has been the creation of artifacts of communication; communication with humans. Everything I’ve done has been the result of the...
2 tags
manifestopheles
In late March, early April, I was feeling like I needed to make something. My normal role is making things that are used to make things: backends for web-served stuff. I got into such things because I’m devoted to the idea that an open web that openly serves information open to interpretation opens doors to knowing, being and doing more. So there in late March, with those thoughts in mind I...
April 2010
1 post
1 tag
XHR and Redirects
The XHMHttpRequest working draft includes this gem about handling redirects:
If the redirect does not violate security (it is same origin for instance), infinite loop precautions, and the scheme is supported, transparently follow the redirect while observing the same-origin request event rules.
Modern browsers appear to handle this correctly. Cheers to them for following the spec. However,...
March 2010
2 posts
2 tags
TiddlyWeb: HTTP for Tiddlers
I wrote a paper about HTTP in TiddlyWeb for WS-REST 2010 and today learned that is was not accepted. Based on the comments in the reviews as well as the titles of those papers that were accepted I think this is an appropriate decision on the part of the program committee. While there is a general consensus that the paper is well written and interesting (3 of the 5 reviewers say the paper was the...
1 tag
twikrad: TiddyWeb Text Editing
I woke up Friday thinking “I ought to work on the TiddlyWeb documentation”. Then I thought “I hate editing in a web browser I want my vim”.
Similar thoughts happened a few years ago at Socialtext resulting in a few half assed attempts to use Perl or bash plus the REST API to GET some stuff into $EDITOR and then PUT it back. Over time the client-side libraries improved...
February 2010
2 posts
2 tags
Good Stuff Matters
When one works in software development, like I do, and one does not work in frequent contact with clients and colleagues, like I do, it is very easy to lose track of the real world value of the work that one does. Instead it is easy to get caught up in the technical details of the work, especially the mistakes, the shortcomings and the imperfections.
Yesterday I went in to London to go to the...
1 tag
Choosing to Know Implicit Goals
Rafe Colburn’s Extreme agility is getting a lot of reads, especially Ryan’s comment. I’ve heard a lot of “How can we be more like that?” and “We’re sort of like that, but how come we don’t get anything done?” reactions.
In my former life as the other founder of Blue Oxen Associates I did a lot of thinking about effective collaboration. Blue...
January 2010
1 post
1 tag
TiddlyWeb News
Been a while since a posting about the state of TiddlyWeb. That’s because quite a lot has been happening.
Tiddlyweb 1.0 - Mid January TiddlyWeb 1.0 was released. The release freezes the HTTP and Python APIs at a known steady state. A 1.0.x branch of development will provide bug fixes as required. New features, optimizations, complex refactorings and other radicality will happen with a...
December 2009
4 posts
1 tag
Tiddlywebweb to App Engine
In the previous posting I showed how to get TiddlyWeb working with Google App Engine but left things a bit hanging: There was no easy way to get some initial content bootstrapped into the hosted TiddlyWeb. It is possible to do direct HTTP calls to the server, using something like curl, but that can be a bit cumbersome. Another option is to use tiddlywebweb, I’ll describe that method here.
...
1 tag
Smooth TiddlyWeb on App Engine
It’s been possible to run TiddlyWeb on Google App Engine for more than a year now, but the process to get things started and keep code up to date has been cumbersome. Recent changes to how TiddlyWeb is packaged and deployed have made the process a good deal easier. Assuming you can satisfy the following requirements
Google App Engine SDK
pip
virtualenv
git
Some version of make
then...
1 tag
Simplewiki for TiddlyWeb
I’ve created a plugin for TiddlyWeb that provides a very simple wiki that adheres to some old school wiki ways, including links to other pages being CamelCase, the editor being a simple textarea, and RecentChanges being provided with the same link-space as the “normal” pages. It uses markdown as its syntax, with the addition of WikiLinks.
You can get it as...
1 tag
TiddlyWeb DreamHost Experiments
These are rough notes for installing TiddlyWeb on a DreamHost hosted virtual domain. This is a fairly technical dump of some things I tried. It is not yet a straight up cookbook because there are some issues to be resolved before it can be. It might not look like it from all this text, but all of this could be compressed down to a very short shell script. That will come soon(ish).
I’ll get...
November 2009
5 posts
1 tag
Templates For TiddlyWeb
There are a few ways to do server side template handling with TiddlyWeb. In one system TiddlyWiki style syntax is used to control output. That system is under development, based on the existing system TiddlyWebPages which uses Jinja2 templates that are stored in tiddlers in the TiddlyWeb store. Yet another system just uses Jinja2 directly. It’s that system which I’d like to write about...
2 tags
The Synthetic Web
In a recent thread on the TiddlyWeb Google group, I stated:
My opinion is that stuff, i.e. information, should be addressable and reusable. That’s my fundamental number one design goal with TiddlyWeb.
This was while making the assertion that the URIs used for entities in TiddlyWeb should have names and structure that is most meaningful and most useful to the general user who stumbles...
1 tag
TiddlyWeb is Tools (not framework)
A couple of fairly extensive email threads on the TiddlyWeb google group have resulted in some noodling on the nature of TiddlyWeb, tiddlyweb-based applications and how those things differ from other tools associated with web based development. The threads have made it clear that those differences are less clear but more important than was previously obvious so I’m restating them here for...
1 tag
TiddlyWeb and ccTiddly
In the comments to TiddlyWeb Plugin Tutorial Part 1 Eric asked:
Has ccTiddly been discarded in favor of TiddlyWeb? What are their essential differences?
I wrote a long answer as another comment which I’ve now copied (with some edits) up as a proper entry to give it a bit more visibility. It helps explains a bit more about the whys of TiddlyWeb.
Short answer is: No ccTiddly has not...
1 tag
Indexed TiddlyWeb Filters
One of the core features of TiddlyWeb is its ability to use filters to constrain the tiddlers that are selected from any collection of tiddlers (bag, recipe, search results, etc.). In the early design discussions that led to the creation of TiddlyWeb filters were conceived as the mechanism a recipe would use to choose only some tiddlers from a bag. Bags are containers for tiddlers that have been...
October 2009
3 posts
1 tag
TiddlyWeb Value Proposition
A common question associated with TiddlyWeb is “What can I do with it?” or “Why would I want to use it instead of Django or something?” The answer is not simple.
Because TiddlyWeb has tools for storing data and presenting that data in various forms over HTTP, it has some of the core features of a web application framework. However, since it (intentionally) is also missing...
2 tags
Python Namespace Packages for TiddlyWeb
In Friday’s TiddlyWeb Dev/Deploy Workshop posting I said that mature plugins need to be packaged so they can be indexed by PyPI and installed via easy_install and pip. At base this is relatively straightforward, put some stuff in a directory, make a setup.py, register the package, package up a source distribution, tell PyPI about it.
This is okay if you have a good name for your package,...
1 tag
TiddlyWeb Dev/Deploy Workshop
Yesterday I gathered with the Osmosoft gang to discuss developing and deploying applications that are built on top of TiddlyWeb. Since I mostly develop TiddlyWeb itself and not things built upon it, I tend to be fairly distanced from the issues so getting together and having a chat and messing about with some code was a good thing.
Mike has written up his summary of the things to do next. I took...
August 2009
2 posts
1 tag
Info Condom
The recent suffering of Twitter and Facebook (and others apparently) at the hands of a huge DDOS is just one more reason to disapprove of centralized, single-source, non-federated services: They are vulnerable to just this sort of thing.
A system of federated presentation services and many Banks of Content would be far less vulnerable. Oddly, this is a well known lesson and a fundamental piece...
1 tag
Recent TiddlyWeb Plugins of Note
Though the historical roots of TiddlyWeb are as a store for quine-like systems (I should write more about this), because it has a very flexible plugin system it also manages to be something of an unintentional web-app framework. Many plugins have been developed over the past several months. Many are experiments to demonstrate possibilities. Others are practical tools. Here’s a bit of info on...
July 2009
1 post
2 tags
Tools Together
Brain Dump
As TiddlyWeb has matured, one of the things I have noticed is that people are often wanting it to do more than it does. The generic form of the query is something along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be more complete if it did X”.
This is interesting to me because in a way it is contrary to the TiddlyWeb point. At base TiddlyWeb is a tool for manipulating chunks of...
June 2009
6 posts
1 tag
Leaping Forward
I’ve been having a bit of a debate with @Casablanca about the need or merits of designing and developing for people who use Outlook or IE. It started with:
@cdent: This #fixoutlook thing is bullshit. Just don’t use outlook!
@Casablanca: @cdent it’s not about whether you use outlook. It’s about having to design for people who do (e.g. our client’s customers)
...
1 tag
S5 For TiddlyWeb
This evening FND and I were discussing how one of these days I’ll have to do a TiddlyWeb presentation: make slides, talk to people, gesticulate in awkward ways while standing in front of people and moving around for no particular reason. I remarked that I was going to use 3x5 cards to lay out my thoughts because they are physical and I think better with physical stuff.
This led to more...
“The GIF Pronunciation Page. It’s jiff. Here’s evidence.”
– The GIF Pronunciation Page
Synthesis
Not long ago I decided to take a break from updating my status on Twitter and Facebook. It was a spur of the moment decision but the urge had been building for quite a while. What I said at the time was: “It’s mediating my conversations and I like the internet when it disntermediates.”
Meaning: Using Twitter and Facebook statuses gives me the action of initiating interactions...
1 tag
Don't Shape My Net Bro
I have always been, and plan to remain, fiercely of the opinion that ISPs should never be involved in traffic shaping at the application/layer 7 level. It is completely antithetical to the spirit of the network (stupid network and all that) and I think in the long run it is very bad business for ISPs.
If a customer wishes to do their own shaping to maintain quality of service (e.g. prioritizing...
2 tags
Internet Bank of Content
This is a followup to Invert the Web where I wrote:
Today I go to a web site and give it some output of my brain. The web site takes my content and in exchange it gives me a URL so I and other people can get to the content again. What should happen instead is that I make some content and give that URL to some websites so they can get to the content.
In typical me fashion that wasn’t...
May 2009
1 post
1 tag
#openhackday
I went to Yahoo’s Open Hack Day London yesterday. Forthwith my observations:
I went with Indy döt Net. We had some misconceptions about the event which may have informed our experience. Back before folk like DHH brought about the sexy extroverted geek, oldsters like myself thought of hackathons as small gatherings with lots of caffeine, pizza, a goal or two or three and lots of bandwidth.
...
April 2009
1 post
1 tag
TiddlyWeb for the Impatient
Update: These instructions have been updated to reflect that the wiki functionality of TiddlyWeb has been migrated into a plugin (called tiddlywebwiki). See TiddlyWebWiki for updates.
When TiddlyWeb first started being usable as an actual server, rather than a codebase against which to run some tests, it felt rather complex, maybe even onerous, to use. I hope that’s no longer true....
March 2009
4 posts
1 tag
TiddlyWeb + IMAP
One of the more interesting but mostly unexplored areas of TiddlyWeb is its ability to use its storage system to adapt pretty much any datastore into something useful to the tiddlers, bags and recipes that TiddlyWeb uses. Last year some time I created tiddlywebweb, which lets you use another (remote) TiddlyWeb server as the storage for a different TiddlyWeb server. While cleaning it up last night,...
1 tag
Docupeopletation
Writing documentation is spectacularly difficult. At least for me. While I’m capable of being quite verbose (perhaps too verbose) in response to a question (perceived or actual) I’m crap at predicting what people will want or need before they get to the point of asking questions.
This is having an unfortunate effect in the land of TiddlyWeb: documentation is lagging quite far behind...
1 tag
What I did on my Spring Vacation
I made raamable.
My friend Stan is going to be part of the support crew of Team Hoosiers when they once again participate in the Race Across America: a west to east cross-continental traverse of the US. On bikes.
Stan wondered about the possibility of some web based resources to help make things go. When heading across the country where every minute counts it’s good to know where you are...
1 tag
Invert the Web
I was talking this afternoon with Fred. Over the past few days, he and Jon have been creating a Twitter archiver called TiddlyTweets using TiddlyWiki plugins. It’s cool: you give it a twitter username and it retrieves all the tweets and archives them in a useful fashion, preserving a link to their original URI.
I’ve been hassling Fred about this, as I like to do, because one of the...
February 2009
5 posts
1 tag
TiddlyWeb Store Migration Plugin
Some of the people at Osmosoft are working on an additional StorageInterface for TiddlyWeb that enables development of tiddler content that is readable by TiddlyWeb, by Cook (the tool used to build TiddlyWikis out of content in the tiddlyweb subversion repository. To help make using the new store, I’ve written a plugin that can migrate TiddlyWeb data from one store to another.
TiddlyWeb...
1 tag
TiddlyWeb Plugin Tutorial Part 3
Update 20091123 to reflect modern TiddlyWeb.
This is the third part of a multi-part tutorial for creating TiddlyWeb plugins. See parts one and two.
Personalized Custom Greeting
“Hello” isn’t always what you want to hear. Let’s change things so the message being sent it based on the incoming URL. Make the following changes (make sure you keep the lines beginning with...
1 tag
TiddlyWeb Plugin Tutorial Part 2
Update 20091113 to reflect current TiddlyWeb state of the art.
This is the second part of a multi-part tutorial for creating TiddlyWeb plugins. See part one.
In part one we set our Content-Type to text/html and our status code to 200 with a start_response call like this:
start_response('200', [('Content-Type', 'text/html; charset=UTF-8')])
It’s quite likely we’re going to make...
1 tag
TiddlyWeb Plugin Tutorial Part 1
Update 20100831: The version of this tutorial kept on the TiddlyWeb documentation site is now the most up to date.
Update 20100405: Yet another version of this document is now being kept in the TiddlyWeb documentation site. See: PluginTutorial.
Update 20091113: This document is fairly popular according to google, but had some wrong information in it. I have updated it to reflect the current...
1 tag
Example TiddlyWeb Plugins
I’ve been experimenting with creating plugins for TiddlyWeb. There are quite a few now, in various states of completeness. They can be found at http://svn.tiddlywiki.org/Trunk/contributors/ChrisDent/experimental/tiddlyweb-plugins/
In addition to requiring a TiddlyWeb installation, some of them also require the tiddlyweb-plugins package which provides generic code for requiring users or the...
January 2009
5 posts
Information Theologist
information: what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things
theology: religious beliefs and theory when systematically developed
I recently decided to give myself the title “information theologist”. It was an idea that popped to mind and rang true, so I kept it.
That notion of ringing, resonance, is at the core of information theology....