So something's been bothering me for a while... When people come to my website through search engines they get a totally different experience from reading it in the context of my TiddlyWiki ie. if they were to put http://www.jonrobson.me.uk#No%20javascript%20tiddlyweb into their address bar.

Instead if they get to this post from their search engine they see a basic html version. This is fine, they can read what I'm saying, but they are getting a totally different experience. This bothers me. From this view they cannot see the content they are missing. For instance if I was to run a tiddlywiki macro called 'thisisthemostamazingmacrointheworld' right now.. here-><, in the html version you missed it. However if you were reading this with javascript maybe some amazing javascript would happen (well in this case the macro doesn't exist and throws an error so that's not important). What *should* happen is that user should be informed that they missed out on this incredibly amazing macro as they have javascript disabled. Just to rub it in a little.

The next thing that annoys me, is the style of the basic html version is completely different from my website style. Black text on white background does not reflect me. I've put lots of effort into my web design, I want people to see that regardless of whether they have javascript or not. However, I want to use TiddlyWiki to edit my website and maintain my content as I am comfortable with the technology and enjoy using it. I don't want to have to maintain several extra files to make sure the site looks the same for non-js viewers. I want everytime I edit my page template for the changes to be reflected in the non-js version.

So put simply I've created a plugin that uses Jinja2 - a server side templating engine to mimic how TiddlyWiki constructs it's pages. It takes the reserved tiddlers PageTemplate and ViewTemplate and converts wiki syntax into html syntax on the server and serves up a page that if it goes well (remember this is a first version so not completely tested) will look pretty much like it would in javascript. If PageTemplate and ViewTemplate are not defined it uses the default TiddlyWiki shadow tiddlers. For example with javascript enabled look at a bag of plugins on my site /wiki/bags/plugins/tiddlers.nojswiki and compare with /wiki/bags/plugins/tiddlers.wiki - it looks very similar. Disable javascript and view the same 2 links and on the latter link you'll get a nasty red box, however if you click browse the content on this page you get that more reassuring interface.

At the moment as soon as you click a link in the non-javascript version you'll be redirected to the javascript tiddlywiki version, so anyone coming from a search engine should now be back in the world you want them to be. Yey. The code if you're interested can be found here for you to try it yourself.