A new version of WikklyText is available for download. This is primarily a developers release, with many internal changes. You can view the list of major changes here.

Note this release is not suitable for use with Drupal. If you are using the Drupal plugin, please continue to use 0.99.22 until the next stable release of the Drupal plugin.

Downloads & instructions can be found at the WikklyText Home Page.

This is a major feature enhancement release for WikklyText, adding these features:

• New script twextract converts a TiddlyWiki into a set of XML and HTML files. This is useful for ...
  • Serving your TiddlyWiki content as a lightweight set of pages instead of each user having to download the entire wiki.
  • Serving your TiddlyWiki content in a Javascript-restricted environment. The generated files are plain HTML.
    
    

You can view a demonstration here: TiddlyWiki Home Page, converted to HTML.

Other enhancements/fixes:

• Wikitexts can use <<set $LINKS_NEW_WINDOW 0|1>> to determine if links open in a new window.
• Improved CSS styling & document structure for standalone documents.
• Bugfixes in tables, allowing the PeriodicTable sample to work again.
• Lots of internal fixes and reorganization.
  
  

Downloads & instructions can be found at the WikklyText Home Page.

This is a bugfix release for WikklyText, taking care of a problem where embedded Python code (<?py ... ?>) was not visible from nested macro calls.

Downloads & instructions can be found at the WikklyText Home Page.

Update: WikklyText is now the default input format here for user comments. You can still use Filtered HTML if you choose, but WikklyText is the default.

You might have noticed a tagline showing up on articles written here lately — "Written in WikklyText". WikklyText is the name of the underlying wikitext engine used here at boodebr.org. WikklyText is a markup language that is "99% compatible" with TiddlyWiki markup. It can be used both as a Drupal plugin, and to create standalone (X)HTML documents. It is written in Python and isn't tied to any particular web framework. You should be able to plug it in to any CMS; I implemented a Drupal plugin because that is what I use.

After much work and polishing, I'm announcing the first public release — 0.99.16. As this is the first public release, please read the documentation and exercise caution before installing on your site and giving unlimited access to anonymous users.

Downloads & instructions can be found at the WikklyText Home Page.

Note that using WikklyText as a Drupal plugin requires Drupal 5.x. I'll gladly accept patches to make it work with Drupal 4.x, but I'm not currently running any 4.x servers.

This file has moved!

New location: Markup Reference

WikklyText has moved!

Beginning with the release of WikklyText 1.0, it is now hosted at wikklytext.com. I think this will be a better location than having it scattered throughout the pages here. wikklytext.com runs a WikklyText wiki (behind Apache) which is nice for demonstration purposes as well.

Prior to Python 2.5, trying to create Python extension modules for Windows with only free tools was an extremely frustrating experience. Python has traditionally been (and still is) compiled with proprietary Microsoft tools, making it difficult to interoperate with gcc. Your options were:

1. Trying to get MinGW to work by using this very painful method.
2. For a while, Microsoft offered a free set of basic compiler tools that could be used to create extensions (it was still fairly difficult, but possible). Unfortunately, Microsoft withdrew the free tools fairly soon after Python 2.4 came out.
3. Recompile Python with MinGW. In theory this could work (I never made it ...) but then you are locked into your own MinGW-only world, and cannot interoperate with the standard Python distribution.
   
   

With Python 2.5, free (as in open source!) tools are finally supported without having to perform any weird voodoo on the standard distribution.

I've updated my tutorial All About Python and Unicode again. It is now fully integrated into Drupal instead of being a standalone HTML document (in a different style and without the ability to add comments ... how 1995!). With this revision I've tried to clarify the section about splitting up Unicode strings, explaining a little more about why it is needed. Enjoy!

Update (2007-03-06): Oops, forgot the table of contents ... added.

IE-only websites are an unfortunate reality on the net. They are especially prevalent on the corporate intranet where I work, where the slogan "thou shalt only use IE" is seen in full effect. I use Firefox as my primary browser, and was getting really tired of having to constantly switch to the desktop, find IE, copy & paste an URL from Firefox, and continue browsing in IE.

As I've mentioned before, I've switched to jEdit from XEmacs. I use both WinXP and Linux, and one thing that was nice about using XEmacs was that it was easy to sync my settings between machines. All I had to do was worry about two files: init.el and custom.el. Both were portable, and could be copied directly between machines.

With jEdit, though, there is an entire tree of settings. These settings live under either ~/.jedit/ on POSIX machines, or under "Documents and Settings/USERNAME/.jedit" on a Windows machine. On my Linux machine, for example, there are 104 files under ~/.jedit. It certainly appears that it will be a huge task to sync between machines. There is a "HOWTO" page, but all it really tells you is how hard it is to do. Its more discouraging than helpful, I think.