TiddlyWiki - How to install an Adaptor

First I wasn’t sure how to install TiddlyWiki plugins. Then I figured that one out. Now I was a bit confused on how I was supposed to install a TiddlyWiki Adaptor (I always thought Adaptor was spelt with an ‘e’ but I guess not J)

I wanted to import plain text files as tiddlers, so was looking for a plugin to do this when I came across this page about importing on tiddlywiki.org. It mentions that “By default, content can only be imported from other TiddlyWiki documents [but] Adaptors can be used to extend that functionality to arbitrary sources”. The Adaptors page it links to simply contains a list of links to Javascript files, so I wasn’t really sure what to do with them a first.

However, after downloading one of these Javascript files, the RawTextAdaptor.js, using right-click à Save Target As, and opening it in a text editor I saw there was a source URL (http://devpad.tiddlyspot.com/#RawTextAdaptor).

I realized that RawTextAdapter was itself a tiddler on a TiddlyWiki compatible page (tiddlyspot.com is a free TiddlyWiki host) so that was good news. Why? Because you can import TiddlyWiki tiddlers from other web pages directly into your own TiddlyWiki as explained by Ken Girard, who helpfully commented on my previous post with this information. He told me to:

• go to the top right corner of your TiddlyWiki and click on ‘backstage'
• then choose 'import'
• enter the url of the site you want to import, so in my case that was http://devpad.tiddlyspot.com/#RawTextAdaptor
• check the boxes of tiddlers you want to import, so in my case that was RawTextAdaptor (it actually shows you all the tiddlers available on the devpad.tiddlyspot.com)
• down at the bottom tick the box that says "Keep these tiddlers linked to this server so that you can synchronise subsequent changes" so that you can use the built-in sync function to get any later updates (‘sync’ is also in the background section).

So that’s what I did and it imported the RawTextAdaptor for me.

The conclusion is that an Adaptor is simply a tiddler. I was just confused by the fact that the wiki linked directly to Javascript files (I would have preferred a link to tiddlers on a TiddlyWiki page). So even without using the import function as described above, I could have added the Adaptor to my Tiddlywiki simply by creating a new tiddler in my TiddlyWiki, and copying the contents of the Javascript file into the new tiddler, giving it any name I wanted and saving it.

However, the advantage of using the TiddlyWiki's built-in 'import' menu is that it gives you that option to "Keep these tiddlers linked to this server so that you can synchronise subsequent changes". This means if the author updates the Adaptor you can easily update it via TiddlyWiki's built-in 'sync' menu. So you don't have to go Googling for updates.

Posted via email from gigajosh's posterous