Launching the "Tiddlyhost Standard Plan"

Of all the items mentioned in the original vision for Tiddlyhost, circa January 2021, the last one to become reality has been the subscription billing idea. I'm pleased to announce that a subscription plan for Tiddlyhost is now available.

This might not invoke a resounding cheer from everyone out there - I like using stuff for free as much as anyone else - but the idea that Tiddlyhost could provide a service good enough that people would choose to pay for it has been something that inspired me to keep working on it over the last couple of years. So I hope that there's a place for a non-free version of Tiddlyhost that provides some enhancements and additional services not available in the free version.

So far, the enhancements included with the new non-free Tiddlyhost are:

Save history

If you need to recover an older version of your site for any reason, the "Save history" feature provides a way to do that. With this feature, you can view, download and restore from up to 100 previous versions of each of your sites. If you delete something accidentally, this provides an easy way to recover it.

To preview the "Save history" feature, click the "Save history" menu item from site actions menu.

Redirecting Tiddlyspot sites to any url

If you claimed a (pre-2021) Tiddlyspot site, this feature allows you to redirect it to any url on the internet. If you have some content that you moved to another location, the redirect will help people find it and refocus search engine results.

To access this redirect feature, click on "Advanced settings" in the Tiddlyspot site settings.

So if you want to read more about the subscription options, please visit the new Pricing page.

I am interested in your feedback, so please do let me know your thoughts. Is the price to low, too high, just right? Would you consider signing up? If not, what might change your mind? Is there a potential feature that you would definitely pay for? Post your ideas in the comments here, or send me an email.

Note that I am planning to keep improving Tiddlyhost for free users and for subscribed users. There will be more improvements coming, so stay tuned.

Thanks very much to those users who have already shown support, either by subscribing already, or by sending donations or sponsorships, or by sharing bug reports and feature ideas, or participating in forum discussions, or posting comments on this blog. I very much appreciate all the support and encouragement received from Tiddlyhost users and the TiddlyWiki community in general. Thank you all!

What's new

New (repost from the journal):

• Cloning and hub listed templates. I mentioned the new cloning support on the forum and several people immediately asked about cloning other people's site, which lead to the creation of the "Templates" page where you can do literally that. See here for details on how to create and share templates like this for others to clone.
• External core javascript support. Thanks to suggestions and technical help by several community members, (see here for details) Tiddlyhost now supports "external core" TiddlyWiki which means the total file size for loading and saving can be a lot smaller due to the "core" TiddlyWiki plugin not being included in the main file. See here for a demo and further explanations, or just try it yourself by creating a site with the "external core" version of TiddlyWiki.
• Deleting and redirecting Tiddlyspot sites. It's been a long time coming, but you can now delete your claimed Tiddlyspot sites, or have them redirect all traffic to an existing Tiddlyhost site.

Coming soon:

• A non-free plan for Tiddlyhost users with some additional features including...
• "Save history" for viewing and restoring previous versions of your sites.

Last chance to preserve old Tiddlyspot sites

I'm planning to pull the plug on old Tiddlyspot sites that have not been accessed, (even once), since Tiddlyhost started serving them around April 2021. So if you had an old old Tiddlyspot site that you want to keep, try to remember its name and make sure to visit it at least once before the cut off date.

I'll aim to answer some potential FAQs below:

When is the cut-off date?

It probably won't happen exactly at this moment, but let's say the deadline is December 31st 2022 at 11:59:59 pm.

What will happen to my old Tiddlyspot site that has not been accessed at least once since April 2021?

It will be gone forever.

How can I save it?

Remember its name and visit it at least once before the cut-off date. (The url is, as per usual, http://<sitename>.tiddlyspot.com/ ).

Do I need a Tiddlyhost account?

No. Just you or anyone visiting, (i.e. clicking on or viewing), the site once is enough to keep it alive.

Do I need to "claim" the site with my Tiddlyhost account?

No, but you're welcome to do that if you want to, and there are some advantages such as being able to change the password via Tiddlyhost, and being able to make it appear in the Tiddlyhost Hub.

How many old sites are there?

There were a total of 100607 Tiddlyspot sites created, from June 2006 to October 2020.

How many are still alive?

At present around 11% of them are still active, i.e. they have been viewed at least once since April 2021, and will continue to exist past the cut-off date. (To make sure your site is on the active list you just need to have visited it once since April 2021.)

What if I can't remember my site's name but I want to keep it alive?

Send me an email and I'll see if I can help jog your memory.

Can I request an extension to the cut-off date?

I guess so. Why do you need it? How long?

What if my old site is alive but I want to kill it?

There's no way to do that currently, but Issue #157 aims to address that. It would require that you first "claim" the site with your Tiddlyhost account, but I'm considering other options for this.

Can I import my old Tiddlyspot site into a new Tiddlyhost site?

You can. There is a guide here on how to do it for TiddlyWiki Classic sites.

Why?

Firstly, there's a bunch of code in Tiddlyhost dedicated to retrieving old sites' content from their location, detecting the old username and password, and making it all work through Tiddlyhost. I'd like to remove that code some day to reduce complexity and maintenance effort.

Secondly, the storage for the roughly 125 GB of old Tiddlyspot data incurrs a monthly bill that I'd like to stop paying, especially since its only reason for existing is in case someone wants to view one of the Tiddlyspot sites that have been ignored or abandoned since at least April 2021. (Sites that have been viewed at least once get migrated to Tiddlyhost's primary storage, so they don't need to be kept in the old storage either.)

Actually what is Tiddlyspot?

It was the predecessor to Tiddlyhost, created back in 2006. It shut down in 2020 but its content was rescued (long story) and is now served by the Tiddlyhost server.

Is there any impact on Tiddlyhost sites?

No. This is only related to Tiddlyspot sites created between 2006 and 2020, i.e. before Tiddlyhost existed.

What's new

 I just posted a journal entry here. Take a look if you want to see what's new and what's coming soon for Tiddlyhost.

What's new since March

I haven't been posting much here, but there are some notes in the Journal, and there's always the issue list and the git history if you want the nitty-gritty.

Looking back it's mostly been minor usability features and bug fixes.

The release of TW 5.2.0 was a good milestone I think, because it means that Tiddlyhost now works with an off-the-shelf standard TiddlyWiki. Prior to that we used a random prerelease version that had the small tweak needed to make the upload saver work out of the box.

I am working on subscriptions. Currently (in my local dev environment) I can bill a user for a monthly subscription, but I still need to work on the UI around that, i.e. to make sure the user can see their subscription, cancel if if they want, upgrade it, etc. It's slow going, because there's quite a lot to do, and perhaps also because slightly less fun than adding cool features and improving the UX.

Ps, it's coming up to the 12 month anniversary of the birth of Tiddlyhost. How should I mark the occasion? Perhaps the go live date is more significant, or the official launch.

Pps, I did also revise the text on tiddlyspot.com, added a TL;DR there, and created some more FAQs just now.

Tiddlyspot "save to web" is back!

I'm pleased to announce that the "save to web" functionality has been restored.

It's new and there might be bugs, but it seems to be working well for me at least. Try it and let me know if you have problems.

The way it works is that Tiddlyhost has taken over the tiddlyspot.com domain name and now serves all the old Tiddlyspot sites, with the UploadPlugin based "save to web" support just like the old days.

Tiddlyspot saving requires just the upload password. It doesn't require a Tiddlyhost account or current login, but if you do have a Tiddlyhost account you can claim ownership of a Tiddlyspot site, which lets you see it in your sites list, and (in future) will let you do things like change the password, and some other stuff I won't mention just yet.

This means the old tiddlyspot is finally resting peacefully, a few months short of its 15th birthday. The torch is passed. :)

Some good news for Tiddlyspot site owners

I've got some ideas on how to bring Tiddlyspot back to life. Stay tuned for details.

Thoughts on novelty TLDs

Are they worthwhile? For example tiddlyho.st appears to be available for $69.99 per year. Good value or nah? Someone has tiddly.wiki, but tid.wiki is available. What are your thoughts on this?