(I tend to get long winded, so if you want to cut to the chase, just hop over and take a look. You don't need to read all this to see what I'm trying to accomplish! Visit http://tiddly960.tiddlyspot.com/ and let me know what you think.)
I think you will see how inspired I have been by TW and its seemingly infinite customizability. I've spent the last few days tinkering on a TW project and I'd be curious to hear your response. I love the way TW let's you very quickly and easily enter, edit, and format content, as well as retrieve what you've stored. I also love all the great TW tools I've found in various resources. There's some really cool stuff out there. But TW stymied me on one issue ... I found it really, really, really hard to do any really significant customization to the layout. TW is designed that way, I'm sure, because its focus is on content, and it has a very simple UI that most folks adapt to easily. It serves its purpose very well. But I wondered if there might be an easy way to give users very broad control over the layout (beyond even the header, mainmenu, sidebar, and story). One of the other tools I use often in my design work is a fluid CSS layout framework. It's designed for rapid prototyping and development of web sites, and it makes it very easy to play "what if" with layouts. Its weakness (because it isn't intended for this purpose) is that it does nothing to help you generate content. Most designers would "lorem ipsum" everything, or apply it on top of whatever existing static content they have available. Since I'm one of those people who likes peanut butter on my chocolate, I decided to try two put to great tools together. My goal was to create a very easy way to display tiddlers anywhere on a page and create any kind of layout, and still have TW running the show. I've made a proof of concept putting the two tools together, letting the grid framework drive the CSS layout, and TW drive the content, and do it by using transclusion and making a very very simple and extensible syntax. This is something that someone with no HTML or CSS experience could work with easily, yet make quite simple or complex layout changes for whatever purpose they may have. This also uses only CSS and no javascript, though you'll see that there are plenty of possibilities for including. That's just not in my skill set. I've only been around TW and the community for a few weeks, and I don't know a lot of the history, and I'm still getting familiar with all the tools that are available, so there may well be other excellent ways to achieve the same goal. But I would be very eager to get some feedback from you TW wizards about whether this would make some kind of contribution to the TW community. I can imagine it being used for a variety of purposes beyond just theming. This has not been extensively tested in any way, other than quick browser checks in Firefox, Safari, Opera and Camino (all on a Mac). I'm too lazy to boot my WinXP to see how it performs in IE (but I'm not sure I really care :-) ). So check it out, download it, kick the tires, and tell me what works and what doesn't. I'm very curious to hear your suggestions and ideas. http://tiddly960.tiddlyspot.com Thanks for taking a tour! David P.S.: It is a testament to the brilliance of TiddlyWiki's design and the good will of the members of this group that I was about to go from and idea to a working site in about three days. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki?hl=en.
