How exciting! Finally after months of excuses I finally decided to sit down and move my site to TiddlyWeb from ccTiddly. My main goal for this was my site was becoming sluggish and taking sometimes up to 10 seconds to load, purely because of the way ccTiddly by default loads all your content into your TiddlyWiki at once. There is a plugin called Skinny Tiddlers in my infancy, but I felt pretty damn sure TiddlyWeb was the answer to my problems.

So first step was to install the site, for this I followed Ben Gillies wonderful guide however since I've never been good at setting up servers I still ran into issues. My main ones were as follows which may be of help to others that are setting up TiddlyWeb:

1) After installing virtual python, when I ran python my server was still using the normal version of python running on my server. I had to modify my .bash_profile file in my home directory so that it looked for my virtual python first.. Since my virtual python was installed in /home/jonrobson/bin I placed this in front of my $PATH.

To refresh the .bash_profile then type . .bash_profile

The next problem I ran into was was with setting up my index.cgi file. It took me ages to troubleshoot as all I was getting was Server 500 error with no useful error message. My first problem turned out to be that when defining tiddlywebconfig_dir I was using a relative directory path, in the end what I needed for it to work was tiddlywebconfig_dir = '/home/jonrobson/www/blog/config' as my tiddlyweb instance called blog was living in this directory on the os (before I had been trying {{/blog}}) thinking it was relative to my directory root.

I then had a another issues in my index.cgi file, and I found that by adding exception handlers I got round them but still am yet to find a solution. My index cgi file also had issues importing tiddlywebconfig as an exception revealed.. {[Cannot import serve from tiddlyweb No module named tiddlywebconfig}}. The reason for this turned out to be that my egg path was set incorrectly. I had been trying {{os.environ['PYTHON_EGG_CACHE'] = '~/.python-eggs'}} however what I needed to have was {{os.environ['PYTHON_EGG_CACHE'] = '/home/jonrobson/.python-eggs'}} - I guess the tilda symbol pointed to the normal python egg directory not my virtual python one.

If your having 500 server error issues when you load tiddlyweb possibly this snippet of code - /development/code/index.cgi.txt- could help you at least identify where your problems lie. It's basically the original cgi file with a few exception handlers put in to give more meaningful error messages.

So now I had a TiddlyWeb instance running I began part 1 of my big plan. Two bags. Lots of tiddlers. I took my currently ccTiddly, and pulled it offline saving it as jon.html. I ran {{twanager imwiki jon.html common}} which put all my tiddlers into a bag called common. My TiddlyWeb was up and running and looking like it had done previously.