Embedding TiddlyWiki in Thunderbird

I couldn’t help but be impressed by post today about embedding TiddlyWiki in Outlook. Using my common technique of ‘improving’ other’s ideas I had to check to see if I could pull off a similar trick with Mozilla Thunderbird (though I prefer the portable version).

Its a piece of cake to get working.

Set a TW file as your default start page

Here are the steps:

• Open Thunderbird (I’m using 1.5 though it works in 1.0 version)
• Select ‘Options’ under the ‘Tools’ menu
• Under the general tab, in the ‘Thunderbird Start Page’ put the path to you TW file. (The easiest way to get the path is to open the TW in Firefox and copy the address URL from Firefox into the location box in Thunderbird)
• Under the ‘Privacy’ tab and the ‘General’ sub-tab allow JavaScript in mail messages. (I unchecked the ‘Block JavaScript in mail messages’ option)
• Click ‘Ok’ to save the settings

View the TW in Thunderbird

This was the toughest part for me to find (though its rather obvious)

• Click in the ‘Go’ menu and select the ‘Mail Start Page’
• Thats it

Here is the all important sceenshot:

Gotchas

• Whenever you open an email it navigates away from the TW page, so you’ll want to make sure that you have autosave on.

Nifty benefits

• This keeps your TW nearby and it will mirror any changes you make to it outside of TW in Firefox
• You can even point it to a TW online like pytw
• TW acts just like you would expect with all your plugins ans TW goodness.

Tools to jump start programming the DOM and/or TW

First of all this post is intended for people that are new to playing with the DOM (document object model) The DOM is the structure in a web page.

Specifically I’ve posted this for my IS450 (Web Development Class) and TiddlyWiki friends though feel free to comment on any additions.

Literature

Before using any tools, I’d recommend getting a bit of knowledge under you belt.

I got started by reading DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design by Stuart Langridge. The first four chapters are available online for free (94 of the 300 pages in the book!)

Quirksmode also has a very good page on JavaScript document events.

Tools

The major tip is that if you are coding a page do the following: make it work using Firefox and its corresponding tools, then make it work in Internet Explorer.

Firefox Extensions:
Web Developer
View the pages rendered source
Colorzilla
Measure It

I’ll put up more stuff after class.

Viewing a page’s source thats been altered by JavaScript

As Ajax becomes more widely used I’ve noticed more and more instances when I would want to view the page’s source after it has been rearranged by some script or other.

This is a piece of cake in Firefox. All you need to do is install the View Rendered Source extension by Jennifer Madden.

This simplifies the source immensly. No guessing on what is where, and its displayed in the familiar HTMLized view. Very handy. Now, there comes a time in every developer’s life where Internet Explorer behaves… differently. How can you view the rendered source in this instance?

That’s the real reason behind this post. I just found View Rendered Source for IE tool by Bill Friedrich. Finally I can check to see what IE is messing up. (Install it by going to the site and opening the zip file, right-clicking on the .inf file and selecting ‘install’)

Once either of these plugins is installed, right-click on the web page and select ‘View Rendered Source’

Nifty Wordpress Plugins

Its time I really dove into posting on this blog So first I might as well get WordPress into the shape I want.

Just a bunch on WordPress plugin links so I can find these later.
WP Database Backup
Image Uploader for posts
Stats Tracking
Photo Press
Image Browser
Polite-ifier
Author Highlight
Google Analytics Plugin
Tiger Admin Interface

Feel free to let me know of any neat plugins that I could use.