Eric, First and foremost, you have been the #1 resource in the TiddlyWiki community for as long as I know it and I would not like at all to slowly see you leave this place.
I am most grateful that you parted some of your valuable knowledge on the inner workings of this marvelous piece of self-empowerment with me ...and most all of us here and elsewhere. I believe, TiddlyWiki has a lot of potential to empower individuals on so many levels. But those potentials cannot fully unfold for a number of reasons which, I believe, are... - the standalone paradigm, lacking fundamental server-side and messaging concepts as well as a harmonized "external resource management" - an overblown core that imposes much more than a "core" really has to ...or perhaps a basic MVC pattern that woud allow to easily swap, at least, the VC part of the portfolio - an incredibly powerful TiddlyWeb which, presumably, way too quickly had been pushed onto a "market" (?!?) dressed up in TiddlySpace garment ...but let's not blame TiddlySpace for things. It sure has helped to further improve its much more essential foundation... which is TiddlyWeb... thanks to a certain group of very inspirational masterminds behind both, including Jeremy. When it comes to good ol' TiddlyWiki, I would have hoped by now that a core had emerged (with TiddlyWiki 5?) which is streamlined in just the same way as a linux kernel supposedly is... or maybe was in some idealized, imaginary version of it. I agree with most of the so far articulated criticism, especially with all those that call for - and have long called for (including myself) - a powerful COMMUNITY PLATFORM, i.e. a plugin / documentation / use- case / etc... repository for the TiddlyVerse. I wish this TiddlyVerse had a different "core" in terms of a central vision, basic tentets and yes, marketing efforts, ...for a "good" and open-source cause... which made it way more accessible to "the world" at large. I believe, the missing link truly is a server-side that comes along with the very same spirit of simplicity, expressiveness and flexibility as TiddlyWiki... which to mold and bake one is free to explore ...with a reasonable level of expertise, of course ...and, well, resource requirements. Besides being based on python, I don't even think that TiddlyWeb is that far from being exactly that. Heck, if python hosting were as popular and freely available as PHP hosting, TiddlyWeb would have gained significantly more momentum by now. Although Wolfgang (and in terms of silence, Eric, too) expressed a certain reluctancy, I do indeed believe that TiddlySpace (or rather TiddlyWeb) is a much understated technology that follows exactly this paradigm... opening up the idea of whatever a "tiddler" represents to a larger public. But then, there is a certain conflict of interest between the self empowering, standalone TiddlyWiki that we know and have grown to cherish with all its somewhat hidden, yet feature rich expressiveness which sure is difficult to decipher and to unveil for noobs or which for one (who is required to follow "governance" principles or one who desperately wishes there was a multiuser enabled environment) finds difficult to rely on the one hand ...and the "centralized" hack- and expandable community-thing, namely Tiddlyspace, that makes content generation and sharing "oh so easy" on the other... but maybe also vulnerable. Rather than providing a solid server side, TiddlySpace tries to compete on a playground where by default it seems to have a tough standing in terms of marketing budget, conversion potential or professional appearance that in no way compare to that of Facebook, Google+ or many, many other content authoring and sharing platforms like Tumblr, Soup.io and Co. Maybe, just maybe, TiddlySpace not only hardly lives up to the potential that TiddlyWeb has in store but also imposes a governance pattern to current (server-side) TiddlyWiki development efforts which creates a funny feeling to a significant number of formerly self- empowered tiddly-enthousiast. One thing is for sure, ServerSides are the way to go in the TiddlyWorld... based on the powerful idea of a tiddler (or whatever you want to call it) and the ease of web based data manipulation that javascript provides... to end users. The missing link has always been equally powerful, adaptable server- sides... providing a persistence layer based on the most simple patterns conceivable... if not, exactly those that TiddlyWeb already does entail. If TiddlyWebWiki were to marry with projects like Diaspora, BitTorrent, even Erlang, then we could talk business... but I find it hard to believe that a "have your TiddlySpace" kind of playground will live up to its underlying potential, at all... although I do indeed enjoy my admittedly unstructured (and way too random) 5 minutes of playing with it here and there. Although I would believe that Eric himself never seemed to participate in or muh care for the server side of the requirement basket (and this might well be the reason for him being cut off from the funding end) I think he stands for all the basic goodness that TiddlyWiki can deliver and for imposing a rigorous filter that does not give up on expressiveness for half-baked implementations, eventually failing to live up to this or that web-trend... or maybe not; who knows. By all means, I wish you good luck, Eric, and so do I for whomever contributes to this very educating and marvelous project and the very enabling potential it unleashes. I certainly intend to keep on contributing to this project, as I have in the past, on a plainly voluntary basis... unless, of course, I figure out a way to turn this into a business from which both benefit to a reasonable extend ...the TiddlyVerse and myself. Cheers, Tobias. -- 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.
