sitepress VS TiddlyWiki

I'm currently facing the same problem - adding a blog to a Rails app.

I thought Sitepress looks interesting, as its supposed to integrate with Rails. Have you given that one a try?

https://sitepress.cc/

I’ve been down this path enough times that I built https://sitepress.cc/, which lets you embed content in a rails app with features that are present in Jekyll, Middleman, etc. like Frontmatter, site hierarchy traversal, etc. It keeps content as files in the app/content directory, but when it’s time to pull data in from the Rails app for SEO, it’s all right there in the Rails app. There’s no “Headless CMS” crap to jump through.

For me, this is another way of keeping everything in a monolith, and which requires a lot less context switching. If I’m building a feature and I want to create marketing or support content for it, it’s all right there in the same repo. I just create the markdown files I need, commit them to the repo, and I’m don.

The thought of switching between a static content site or something like Webflow just seems silly. I think they only makes sense for huge teams.

In case you want something like Middleman (frontmatter, static compilation, ...), but embedable in your Rails app, Sitepress is really cool solution (you can even run it without Rails!): https://sitepress.cc

I went the opposite direction and built a static site generator on top of Rails: https://sitepress.cc/

Turns out, Rails is a really good web framework! I tried building Sitepress on something “light weight”, Tilt and Rack, and it was a pain. I found myself constantly solving the same problems that were already solved in Rails. At some point it dawned on me that I could just build on top of a few parts of Rails, so I did. I wrote about it at https://fly.io/ruby-dispatch/single-file-rails-app/

I’m glad I did! Now I can plug all of the Rails template handlers, view components, and other Rails plugins into it and ride off that entire communities docs.

If you find yourself thinking, “rails is too heavy”, consider shedding the parts of Rails that you don’t need. Then as your application grows in complexity and you find yourself needing more parts of Rails, bring it back in.

As I was building Sitepress (a site generator like Middleman, Jekyll, & Bridgetown), I stumbled into the idea that a Rails application can exist in a single file and wrote about it at https://fly.io/ruby-dispatch/single-file-rails-app/.

Agreed. I built https://sitepress.cc/ that uses git + files to manage content in Rails, but it needs an editor.

I’m not sure if the right thing to do is build a web editor or smooth out git workflows so that non-technical people can open content files with desktop software to make changes to the content.

I created https://sitepress.cc/ because you can have both! It can run a dynamic content site from a Rails app or it can compile out pages that can be deployed to any static website host.

It doesn’t have a front end for authoring pages, styles, etc, but that could be built on top of this library.

I was using Middleman for a while, but then grew tired of all the dependencies I had to always keep up-to-date. I did the completely illogical thing and built my own static site generator, https://sitepress.cc/

A few years later and I ended up deleting most of it and replacing the internals with Rails. Now Sitepress is just a tiny rails application sitting on top of a bunch of files. Most of the maintenance and dependencies are handled by major Rails lib maintainers.

When you deploy it, you can compile it into static files and deploy as you’d expect, but you can also deploy it as a rails or rack app … or even embed it into an existing rails app.

When Rails 7.0 gets released I’ll drop JS importmaps into the default install for free and have my dream static site generator that doesn’t have a huge asset compilation step.

> What does ownership mean here?

It means owning the code and the data. With webapps, the code and data are hosted and owned, the users do not own the code, cannot run it independently. This is a clear dileneation between owner and user, and the owners can use that clear line to create artificial scarcity of various kinds. (The most popular being the subscription SaaS model). It's also easier to defend your IP since end users never see your binaries.

I like to make my software single html files whenever possible. People can just save them and run them locally. Havent met anyone who cares yet though.

I like that idea a lot, and I care. I think others care, but yes, it's a niche interest. Take a look at https://tiddlywiki.com/ for an example of a fairly successful project that uses the single html format running locally. However it suffers from limitations on File|Save which often requires a separate runtime of some kind to support.

Another project that approaches this ideal is https://redbean.dev/, @jart's tiny, performant, featureful single-file webserver. In this case the "single file" is a server executable + zip whose state must be updated on the command-line, but I think hits a sweet spot in terms of practicality, and a global minima when it comes to minimizing dependencies. (Redbean bundles SQLite and Lua so it's also possible to do through-the-web state updates as in a traditional webapp.)

My own project, Simpatico, aspires to be something along these lines. Eventually your browser tab is both a client and server process, connecting via websockets to other connected browsers, storing all state locally. I call this pattern "monomorphism", a play on the "isomorphic" javascript SPA. The server[2] is currently written in ~1 node file, but eventually I would like to port to redbean (and greenbean, the websocket version of redbean, but it isn't quite ready yet). The server grew several features to support a fast, practical BTD loop using markdown[1], and safe, performant execution on the public internet[2], but ultimately I'd like to pare it down to serving a single html file and allow the connected clients to provide all diversity of experience. I've used it to explore all kinds of browser apis, from crypto[3] to svg[4] to writing my own libraries (combine[4] and stree[5]). And it's all running locally, and easily hosted on a $5 VPS, and its all open source.

1 - https://simpatico.io/lit.md

2 - https://simpatico.io/reflector

3 - https://simpatico.io/crypto

4 - https://simpatico.io/combine

5 - https://simpatico.io/stree

I use TiddlyWiki. It's a portable editable wiki that doesn't require a web server or web hosting. You open it from your computer, edit it, and save it. You get all of the linking that you'd expect to see in a wiki, and it's super readable and easy to use.

It is a single-HTML-file TiddlyWiki instance that runs in a web browser (offline as well as online), meant to be downloaded and stored wherever suits you best. Everything that you see when working in BASIC Anywhere Machine (everything that makes "BAM" work as an IDE and all BASIC programs) exist in the one HTML file.

TiddlyWiki still works as intended: https://tiddlywiki.com/#GettingStarted but there are so many different clients to run on. Mobile or Desktop ? What OS? What Browser?

This effort https://val.packett.cool/blog/tiddlypwa/ is remarkable as the mobile side of saving is not as robust as on the desktop side of things and there is a scaling limit on performance as the number of tiddlers grows. Also the syncing between tw documents between different desktop/mobile clients can be a challenge with diffing.

Since then I've moved back to plain vanilla vim for a wiki (map gf :tabe ) but tw.html is still good for data other than plain text and TiddlyPWA https://tiddly.packett.cool/ is a great effort to revisit TiddlyWiki again.

You should check out TiddlyWiki as it’s designed around the concept that small linkable notes are the best way to organize.

https://tiddlywiki.com/

It’s html based so you can access it in the same way you would access a website but it can be locally stored. Saving is a bit tricky but there are multiple solutions detailed on their site. https://tiddlywiki.com/

Hi, you can use tw on nodejs with npm package tiddlywiki....