A TiddlyWiki autosave server that is simple, friendly & runs on Windows

#1

Hi folks! I wrote a server that serves and automatically saves your wiki. It is a single file executable that runs on windows (and probably most other systems (untested)) and should work out of the box.

After changing my browser to Firefox, my wiki’s old chrome-based auto saver broke down, and I couldn’t find a polished solution that didn’t need to install anything and can save to any location. I did found out that TiddlyWiki could automatically save itself if hosted on a WebDAV server (like rclone) and thought about implementing just enough of WebDAV to convince TiddlyWiki to hand its data over.

It turned out lots of other people had already thought of this and did just that, so I tweaked their implementations a little until I could use it without a terminal window and called it a day. I’ve used it for a couple of days now and still think it’s neat.

image
(My current setup)

You can download tid.com from github. Don’t hesitate to ask questions here and I hope you like it too!

3 Likes
#2

Please add some minimalist doco about hoiw its installed and used so we are not running exe’s on our computer without some assurance we are not installing malware?

Only then can I test and give you deserved praise for this.

4 Likes
#3

Good call. I poked through the lua source code a bit and tried running it on Linux.
It didn’t like me.

#4

Yeah that’s fair, l should say more about how the server Tid works.

tid.com is a portable single file executable. It contains all the data it needs to run itself and only modifies the wiki you give it, so there isn’t an installer. (People used to make software that you can put on a usb stick and run on any computer, I wonder why they stopped…)

To use it, download tid.com, put it anywhere and click to run. By default, Tid edits a wiki named wiki.html in its folder and will open a tab in your web browser. To edit a wiki in another location, just drag it onto tid.com to "Open with tid.com".

You can also run in the shell of your choice tid.com your_wiki.html where your_wiki.html is your wiki’s filename, which will at least show the error messages.

That said, it is a random executable on the internet, so if you’re unsure about its safety, you may:

  1. Run it with Sandboxie Plus to ensure that all changes are reversible
  2. Make the sausage yourself: download from redbean.dev redbean-3.0.0.com and zip, rename them into tid.com and zip.com, download all three files from github’s src folder, then run in a terminal: zip.com tid.com .args .init.lua index.lua, which should create the same file as the tid.com you download.
    image
    (the folder’s state before & after you run the zip command)

Also refer to past implementations by tiddly-bean, Rick Dillon and coderofsalvation on this forum.

1 Like
#5

First of all, thanks for trying Tid! It would be nice if you could run tid.com in a shell like bash and post the error messages here, so I can see the problem better.

According to redbean.dev:

On some Linux systems, you might get errors relating to run-detectors or WINE. This is due to binfmt_misc registrations. You can fix that by adding an additional registration for the APE file format redbean uses:

sudo wget -O /usr/bin/ape https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/ape-$(uname -m).elf
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/ape
sudo sh -c "echo ':APE:M::MZqFpD::/usr/bin/ape:' >/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register"
sudo sh -c "echo ':APE-jart:M::jartsr::/usr/bin/ape:' >/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register"

Alternatively, you can download from redbean’s supplementary tools assimilate which “may be used to turn your redbean “(tid.com in our case)” into a native binary”, which might make it work.

I have absolutely no idea what either of these do but maybe they’ll fix your problem. In the meantime I’ll try convince my friend to test Tid on his linux.

#6

That sounds like what I’m running into. When I have some free time I’ll try that fix. Thank you!