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?

Announcing Tiddlyhost.com

I'm pleased to announce the launch of Tiddlyhost!

Tiddlyhost is the successor to Tiddlyspot. I've been working hard to create it and I'm really happy with the progress. It's pretty new, and still in development, but I feel like it's ready for some kind of launch.

Unlike Tiddlyspot, Tiddlyhost:

• Is secure. All requests are via https with a proper SSL certificate.
• Has a password recovery mechanism. If you forget your password you can request a password reset email.
• Supports TiddlyWiki5. TiddlyWiki5 is turning 10 years old this year. It's mature, powerful, and available on Tiddlyhost.
• Is fully open source. If you want to suggest ideas, contribute improvements, create your own Tiddlyhost, or just follow the development process, you can do it on Github.
• Let's you share and discover TiddlyWiki sites. The "Tiddlyhost Hub" is a place where you can discover interesting Tiddlyhost sites and also share your own.

If that sounds good, please sign up at tiddlyhost.com and give it a try.

If you have suggestions or experience any problems, please create an issue here. See also the code and the FAQ.

A few notes:

• As mentioned, Tiddlyhost is new and in development. I can't guarantee there won't be problems. It would be wise to download your site once in a while just in case something goes terribly wrong and your data gets lost.
• Please be nice. For example don't upload your entire photo collection, or generate a ton of spammy content.

-Simon

Sites with hyphens in their names are recoverable now

Sorry about that.

Sites available in read-only mode

As far as I know everyone's sites should be back online, but saving updates and creating new sites is not supported.

Please take this opportunity to make backups of your sites.

Update: There was a bug causing problems for sites with numbers in their names. This has been fixed now, so please try again this impacted you.

Update on Tiddlyspot site recovery

I now have access to the S3 bucket that all Tiddlyspot sites have been backed up to. Thanks Clint Checketts for the help. (This means the Dreamhost ticket #9255564 I mentioned before is no longer relevant.)

I'm working on a script to download all the sites using aws. It's kinda working, so at this stage it appears I will be able to recover the data from all Tiddlyspot sites, assuming they made it into the S3 bucket safely.

Once I have the data, my plan is to try to bring back a readonly version of Tiddlyspot. It's likely "public" sites will be available there sooner than "private" sites, since I'll need to figure out a good way to keep private sites private.

Anyway, I'll keep you posted on the progress via this blog.

Ps, the idea of bringing back a fully functional Tiddyspot at some point in the future is still on the table, but I'm going to focus only on data recovery for now.

Pps, thanks very much for the responses. The summary is a lot of you are still using Tiddlyspot, and there are quite a few people who don't have any backup copy of their sites.

What happened to Tiddlyspot?

Dreamhost moved the entirety of the site data to a "DreamObject" backup storage and hence it's no longer online.

Their reasoning for doing that is that Tiddlyspot site consists of "personal backups" and hence violates their terms of use. I presume this is because the "backups" folder stores previous versions of your TiddlyWiki.

(There was also a bug where the number of site backups would sometimes grow unbounded rather than being pruned down to a fixed number of revisions. So there is a reasonable case for Dreamhost to be annoyed by that.)

Bad News

The future of Tiddlyspot is unclear. I'll need to negotiate with Dreamhost and I'm not sure how communicative they're going to be. Maybe if we agree to remove all the site backups Dreamhost would put it back how it was, but I don't expect it to be done quickly.

Good News

Your site data is presumably safe and sound in a DreamObject, so if for some reason the Tiddlyspot version was your only copy there's a good chance it can be recovered.

Question?

Tiddlyspot was pretty cool back when it was new, but it has aged badly and (I'll confess) been neglected by its owners for many years. For this reason, the idea of gently retiring Tiddlyspot has been considered. Maybe we'll hang on to the domain name for when/if Daniel & I come up with a new, modern, secure version of Tiddlyspot. That said, I don't have a good sense of how many people are using it actively now and how many would miss it if it were gone. So, if you are seriously impacted by Tiddlyspot being unavailable, please let me know how and why.

Update, Oct 25: I have a support ticket open at Dreamhost to request access to the data. The ticket number is #9255564.

Update, Feb 19: Re a new, modern, secure version of Tiddlyspot, see "Announcing Tiddlyhost.com".