One problem with TiddlyWiki is that it’s all JavaScript. That is, the content is also embedded in JavaScript strings, which are then rendered to HTML by JavaScript contained in the wiki itself.

Typically, this sort of content never gets parsed by Google, because Google just parses HTML (and PDF and a few other static content formats). And that’s fair enough: we can’t expect Google to execute our JavaScript to find out our content. However, this means that a Tiddly-based site just doesn’t get indexed. If I do searches on my own blog, I’ll find posts on my old blog (because Nanoblog actually only uses static pages – it’s good about that) and none on my new blog. This sucks.

Of course I’m not the first one to enjoy Tiddly’s flexibility and general sexiness. And of course I’m not the first one to wish my site would be indexed by Google. Among the several solutions that have been thought of by people, [[this one

http://www.superphysique.net/#%5B%5BSEO%20TiddlyWiki%20Plugin%5D%5D]] appeared the best to me: it actually creates a static, HTML-rendered replica of the wiki, one tiddler per page, with the static pages that redirect to the appropriate section of the wiki. This means Google happily indexes the static pages, and users going to the indexed pages end up on the wiki. All is well.

But for one problem: I was using ccTiddly, which is based on PHP and MySQL to provide for editing of the content over the Internet. I wasn’t mad about that, and now it actually gets in my way: the afore mentioned plug-in won’t work with that setup. Darn.

So I’ve back-pedalled to a somewhat more primitive, but I think more flexible and satisfying, solution: set up a WebDAV service on my Apache server, turn my wiki back into a single, normal TiddlyWiki file, and use the [[Save to DAV

http://peter.suschlik.de/wiki/#SaveChangesToDAV]] plug-in.

I now have a ‘reading’ URL (http://www.rutschle.net/wiki/), a secure ‘editing’ URL (https://www.rutschle.net/dav/) and static files under the reading URL.

It all seems to be working now. I hope I haven’t messed up the RSS feeds. There’s been only one serious bug, in the Save to DAV plug-in: I had to explicitly add the txtDAVURL variable to the config.options table, in the source.

On the negative side, I think I lose the ability to generate the RSS when not at my computer (i.e. I need to open the file as ‘file:///’), and I think the static generation only works locally as well. I can live with that.

On the positive side, I now have a normal, self-contained TiddlyWiki file, which should make integration of plug-ins more straightforward.

EDIT: After setting this up, I went to the office and was disappointed to see that the ‘save to dav’ macro had disappeared. Turns out there is a checkbox in the AdvancedOptions to //Hide Editing Features when viewed over HTTP//, which is all well to not confuse the casual reader, but just gets in my way when using DAV. I’m a bit surprised this wasn’t mentionned in the save-to-dav plug-in. Oh well. Anyway, this is posted from the office, so there.