Another possible ad format for Tiddlyspot

See this example. It has a small text link ad unit in the top right. The good thing about this format is that it doesn't require any javascript hack to position it and is hence more tolerant of variations PageLayout. I think the colour is important though, for instance it would look terrible in that position if it was black on white instead of matching the colour of the SiteTitle panel. Potentially we could let you choose your colour via your control panel or try and guess it by looking at your colour scheme.

Compare to the older example here (a single text ad above search and a banner at the bottom).

Once again we're interested in opinions (positive and negative) on ads on tiddlyspot. If you have any post them in the comments. Note that at present I can't see the point in ads for private (password protected) sites. The reason is that since Google can't spider a private site it won't be able to give ads relevant to the content.

Google Analytics

As of now we are going to be inserting a Google Analytics stat tracker into Tiddlyspot sites. It should go in there the next time you save. Hopefully you won't notice anything different. The tracker code will be stripped out when you download your site. This will give us stats on our traffic and bandwidth and possibly in the future we will be able to use Google Analytics data to provide some more detailed stats on individual sites in your control panel. As always please let us know at support@tiddlyspot.com if you encounter any problems.

TiddlyWiki tools for ruby

Maybe that should be ruby tools for TiddlyWiki. As previously mentioned some of the code used in Tiddlyspot (the part that assembles your TiddlyWiki file) is open source. If you know a bit of ruby you can use it for all kinds of TiddlyWiki fun. It's called r4tw and as of last night it supports TW 2.2 files and has some rudimentary RDoc. To use it just download the r4tw.rb file and put it in your current directory.

Here is the code repos. And here is the new RDoc (such as it is). To use it you just need r4tw.rb. You can skip the rest of the files. Some people say I should have just used cook and ginsu. They might be right but r4tw its guaranteed to cook your TiddlyWiki's 15% tastier. Just remember this catch phrase, "r4tw: now you're cooking". Or this other one, "we don't need to steenkin' recipe". ;)

But in seriousness they do have slightly different focii. R4tw considers the TW core (as distinct from the store area) as a black box, while cook can assemble it from separate js files. (Wtf is cook? See here).

Here is an actual snippet of Tiddlyspot code that's using r4tw:

...
source_file empty_file
copy_all_tiddlers_from flavour_file if File.exist? flavour_file
add_tiddler_from_file "#{tiddlyspot_content}/UploadPlugin.js"
package_as_from_dir   "#{tiddlyspot_content}/TspotSetupPlugin.js", "#{tiddlyspot_content}/TspotSetupPlugin"
...
dt = get_tiddler 'DefaultTiddlers'
dt.prepend_content "[[Welcome to Tiddlyspot]] " if dt
...

You can find more example code in the test unit folder. Sorry the tutorial might be a long time coming.

Anyway the reason I've been working on this is that I need so that Tiddlyspot can support 2.2 when it arrives. I've tested with the beta and so far so good. I'll probably wait until it's out of beta before making the flavour available and also like I said before I want to test the new 2.2 enhanced UploadPlugin.

Update
r4tw now has a home page.

Gallery now with hand crafted screenshots

Oh boy I spent way too much time on that. I really hope websnapr comes through with my support request. Anyway I have to say thanks and give a couple of suggestions to Andy M, the author of Screengrab! Firefox Plugin:

• Allow option for url based filename instead of title
• Allow option to scale the image to a defined size

Check out the the gallery if you didn't already.

Gallery a little bit sad looking

I thought I was clever to use Websnapr for screenshots in the new gallery. And I swear it was working beautifully for a while. Now it's doing this kind of thing... :( I'm pretty sure the text in the red says "This page requires javascript". I think I will send them an email.

Update
Here's a test page using thumbshots.org, which I don't have a lot of faith in so far.