Author Archives: Alison

The joy of Tiddlyspot

When I first encountered Tiddlyspot, the hosted version of Tiddlywiki (Wikipedia entry), the brilliant, javascripted-to-the-max, server-independent wiki written by Jeremy Rushton, I confess to not immediately seeing the need. I had about a dozen tiddlywikis applied to various writing and organizational projects, a number of which of which lived on a 1 G fire engine red Transcend JF110 alongside their own copies of Portable Firefox for both OSX and Windows. What I ran up against, though, was a concern about security, if I moved outside a restricted set of trusted computers (especially to university library systems). A USB stick seemed to me too good a vector (think phage), and since I haven’t done the poking-under-the-hood on Windows machines that I have on Macs, I wasn’t confident that I had the expertise to ensure I didn’t transmit anything unwanted on the Windows side. But I liked my portable wikis.

Hence the beauty of Tiddlyspot. It’s accessible from any computer-with-internet (and reasonably modern browser), without incurring the security risk of transferring a USB stick. The sign up is simplicity itself: username (which becomes the subdomain name) and password gets you a wiki. You have the option of a public or a private Tiddlywiki, via the control panel tucked behind it, password accessible. A handful of different flavours are available on sign-up, and once you understand Tiddlywiki styling, you can apply that understanding to Tiddlyspot to customize the look – with the caveat that you have to keep the content in the sidebar that allows you to upload and download. The standard set of Tiddlywiki plugins can be used to create tag clouds, most recent updates, splash pages, etc. Backup is a one click download of the whole file to your local hard drive – no XML or archives. You can take it off-line by downloading a local copy, working on it, and then uploading it later. Saving changes and uploading is password protected. I’ve had to email tech support once, and got a prompt and helpful response from Daniel Baird, author of the infernal Minesweeper plugin for Tiddlywiki. (Infernal as in addictive).

Limitations and unknowns: Tiddlyspot Tiddlywikis don’t seem to be terribly visible to Google (I tried an inurl:Tiddlyspot search, which missed most TS-TWs). Maybe this is because TWs tend to be internally linked rather than externally, but maybe Google doesn’t digest Javascript well; I want to look into this. I don’t know how big a TW can get before it breaks (though I haven’t broken one yet). A new dialect (well, different from Dokuwiki and Backpack) of markup has to be grasped. Plugins can slow down the loading (aww, but they are such fun!) There doesn’t seem to be a way to dump all content to a single flat file, though there’s a plugin that will create multiple hyperlinked static HTML files. TW in general is not meant for multiple users. When I started the Okal Rel Universe Concordance, with the intention of it being a multiuser wiki, I had to think through a protocol to prevent co-authors from clobbering each others’ edits. Only the last user is recorded as editor: there’s no edit history. I don’t know whether its security has yet been challenged by the scriptkiddies and wikispammers [1] (this is a downside??) – but note the ease of backup and reconstitution. ([1] Insert here obligatory plaint from senior netizen that this is not the web of yore).

The TS-TWs I have going so far are: the aforementioned ORU Concordance, the Women Scientists in Fiction page previously mentioned (still in early stages), a collection (still in its early stages) of Worldbuilding resources, and a couple that are currently private. On the USB stick, and possibly to move on line, I have repositories of medical and scientific scraps of information, a concordance around a series of linked novellas I am working on, and a scratchpad for another writing project. Other people have been far more inventive – see the Tiddler titled ‘Examples’ on www.tiddlywiki.com.

Additional links:

  • Portable apps for Windows, for Portable Fireflox and a surprising number of others
  • Portable apps for OSX
  • My Tiddlywiki resources page on Backpack – since Google doesn’t seem to be great at indexing TWs, and most of the information and instructions for TWs are contained in TWs, I’ve realized I need to make an immediate note of where I find something – or I might never find it again. A while back I tore my hair out trying to find the plugin that would load the latest 5 tiddlers on opening.

Back into the saurian ooze from whence it sprung

I hope I remember that correctly; it’s warm, and I’m too torpid to track down The Language of the Night on my disarrayed bookshelf – it’s Ursula Le Guin, quoting a phrase from a long ago pulp SF novel. The saurian ooze lingers in a marvellous riff she contributed to Dave Langford’s Ansible, in response to the statement that `Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.’ Ruth Franklin (Slate, 8 May 2007). It begins …

Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs — somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly … but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn’t rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn’t rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green.

… it continues …

With thanks to Ed Willett, on the SF Canada listserv.

LabLit

Waybackwhen – in other words, before Mosaic, and dot coms and all – I posted a question about fiction with women scientists in which the science was central to the story on the women in bio forum on bionet, got some great replies, expanded my list, and some years later published a [cref stealing-fire short essay on women scientists in fiction], in the late, lamented HMS Beagle. I’ve recently started exploring the topic of Women Scientists in Fiction again in the form of a Tiddlyspot tiddlywiki, and am joyously distracting myself from about half a dozen other projects by rummaging around in the plethora of resources not available to me the first time – on-line library catalogues (Worldcat rocks, even although LOC indexing is baffling to the MeSH-accustomed), databases, and bibliographies from all over the world, compilations from other enthusiasts, book reviews, small publishers, etc etc, as well as the traditional forms of articles and books. I have to find out how to back up my zotero stash before the I catch the attention of the household god of undone backups (one of the Trickster gods, no doubt). The subgenre of realistic fictional portrayal of science and scientists has acquired a label, ‘LabLit’, at least in the UK, and a website, LabLit.com, dedicated to the culture of science in fiction and fact, which includes a list of novels, films, plays, and TV programs in the Lab Lit fiction genre. It’s a good list. Now if I could just remember where I put the article from ca 1983 (waywaywaybackwhen) that gave a very comprehensive survey of scientists in fiction to that date, or if I still have it, or indeed, anything about it except that it made reference to Mildred Savage’s In Vivo and David Foster’s The Pure Land. It’s all very well having a memory, but the memory needs an index!

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Fantastic Toronto

Courtesy of BoingBoing, here is Karen E. Bennet’s Fantastic Toronto: A Survey of Toronto in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, an on-line annotated bibliography, started in 2003 and still ongoing, of SF/F/H fiction in which the city of Toronto figures, as a setting, point of departure, destination, or transfer-point. She started it for the 2003 Worldcon and it just growed, as these things tend to. She mentions having found SF set in other cities, Vancouver, for one. I’d like a look at that list.

Politics, Passion, and The Halifax Connection

I have been doing some much-needed updating on Marie Jakober’s page, at my sff.net site, having checked and found that The Halifax Connection, her latest novel, was out as of April 24, 2007. It is the third of her Civil War novels, after Only Call Us Faithful and Sons of Liberty, both of which were award winners. I’ve seen reviews, warm ones from The Calgary Herald and The Montreal Gazette, and a somewhat sniffy one from the reviewer in Quill and Quire who disliked the romance but found the history interesting. Vexingly, that’s the one coming out top in the Google rankings.

It’s not fashionable, these days, to mix politics and passion. There’s too much well-groomed cynicism about politics, and passion seems once more to have withdrawn into private life. ‘The personal is political’ is a sentiment that is deemed passé. Not so for Marie. In her novels love becomes a revolutionary act, committed in defiance of a repressive social order that is, perhaps, the true enemy. All her lovers transgress: Marwen and Shadrak (Even the Stones), Raven and Karelian (The Black Chalice), Pilar and Daniel (Sandinista, A People in Arms), Valerian and Chema (A People in Arms), Branden and Charise (Sons of Liberty), and Eryn and Sylvie (The Halifax Connection). They transgress against religion, against marriage, and against class. Even respectable spinster Elizabeth (Only Call Us Faithful) acknowledges without shame her own capacity for desire. And her characters recognize that the most basic freedom is freedom of the body, freedom to express oneself sexually and intimately, and that this is bound up with all larger freedoms. There is no such thing as a private haven in an oppressive world.