Download websites that use TiddlyWiki

About TiddlyWiki

TiddlyWiki is unusual among the things we detect, because there is no company behind it to ask. No vendor is recorded against the entry, the code carries a BSD licence, and the project has been running since 2004, which by the standards of browser software is a very long stretch. In practice that leaves a crawl as the only way to say how many public installations exist, since there is no sales team holding a customer list and no licence server counting seats.

The product is a wiki that lives inside a single HTML file, carrying its own content and its own application code in the same document, which is why our catalogue files it under CMS even though many of its users would call it a notebook rather than a publishing system. As of October 2026 we see it on 93 sites. A figure like that describes the public, crawlable slice of usage and nothing beyond it, because the ordinary way to run this software is to keep the file on a laptop, in a sync folder or behind a private host where no crawler will ever meet it. The visible population is a sample of a larger and mostly private one, and the size of the remainder is not something we can honestly estimate.

Detection itself is generous by our standards. A self contained wiki cannot hide behind a server, since the entire application is delivered to the browser, so the markers are right there in the document. The trade off is that a heavily customised install, or a wiki exported to plain static pages, can shed those markers and fall out of the count.

Version data is where the file becomes interesting. We record 26 distinct versions across 93 sites, with 5.4.1 the value our summary reports as representative. A spread that wide over a footprint that small is the signature of self hosting. There is no update service, no managed platform pushing a release and no vendor deprecating old builds, so an installation stays on whatever version its owner last saved and moves only when that person decides to move.

For a researcher the appeal is that this population behaves like a natural experiment in unmanaged software. Long lived versions sitting untouched on public domains are the pattern security teams care about elsewhere, and here it can be measured directly rather than inferred, because the version is stated in the page. Anyone studying how open source tools age without a vendor, or building products for the self hosted end of the web, gets a ready made cohort.

A single lookup will tell you that a domain runs the software and which version it reports. The list answers what a lookup cannot reach, which is how versions distribute, which domain suffixes the community clusters on, what the public footprint does over time, and how much of it actually moves when a release lands. Two dated exports turn a static curiosity into an upgrade curve.