Case Studies For Learners

#1

Hi,

I found the suggestion offered by etardiff for question Only show custom view template tiddler under certain condition?
very informative - a good ‘learning’ example.

Would it be useful to have some kind of a class of discussion post where kindly volunteers could cleanly summarise both the question or requirement and the ‘best’ solution and tag them ‘case studies’ perhaps with some additional tags to help classify them. I say volunteers in the hope that if this was useful and workable then sharing the workload would be a good idea, maybe OP gets first opportunity to repost as a ‘case study’ etc…

It’s probably a tough one - I would not know how to tag the above so that it popped up when I wanted to explore a particular area of TW know-how so perhaps this is simply too hard to achieve but it doesn’t hurt to think of this kind of thing now and then.

Maybe it’s time I created a new Tiddlywiki myself and started copy-pasting cool or interesting ‘case studies’ in there myself for my own use - maybe it’s difficult to come up with something useful to everyone?

And of course sometimes the posts responses made prior to the solution may be illuminating so it is not clear that a summary consisting only of problem and solution would preserve the full value of the original thread so I am not suggesting that short summaries are perfect but perhaps easier most of the time.

#2

In theroy, it sounds good, but I have a feeling the forum has more solution than discussion. In other words, more than half of the posts would be tagged or categorized as “case study” as you put it.

Like you said, what is useful for one person may be irrelevant for others, so, the idea of keeping track of the tid bits you find that are useful to you, should be, as you suggested, stored in your own tiddlywiki.

I have been doing just that for years. I have an entire section of my tiddlywiki dedicated to Cheatsheets, Tid-bits, Solutions and Examples that I have tagged and cross referenced for easy locating when I need it. When ever relevant, I have put the original forum url in the source field of the tiddlers so I can go back and brush up on the full discussion if I missed something.

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#3

Yes, I’ve been doing this too, with the added benefit of using my own words to describe the code, in my native language, so it’s easier to search later.

And also let’s promote @Mohammad’s great work of collecting and indexing solutions in his Scripts in TiddlyWiki resource!

Fred

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#4

Don’t forget my Documenting TW — a non-linear personal web notebook where I occasionally add solutions and will want to add this one!

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#5

That’s what I do too, as the responders above me:
wilk-tweaks.tiddlyhost.com

I try to put there everything that I have come up with or found somewhere, which is generalizable enough to make it potentially useful for my other wikis in the future or for other people. I try to document it at least a little bit, again for my future self and hopefully for others.
I also keep all of these tweaks listed on links.tiddlywiki.org.

#6

I too have been keeping my own list.

But I would like to have something more general. I had been heads-down on other things until last week, and I thought I might start on my big idea by now, but I really needed a little intellectual break. So I’m not ready to start it yet, but this is my goal: Write something like Dave Giffords excellent Documenting wiki, but larger, and with more organization.

The idea would be to have community-generated content but presented with a single voice. It should have a feedback/contribution mechanism more useful to non-coders than the GitHub PR process (my usual tool.)

I have an edition (https://crosseye.github.io/TW5-Tiddox/) I’ve created for other documentation projects. I’ve mentioned it here a few times, but never focused on it, because it may be too idiosyncratic for others to use, and I haven’t been ready to offer support for it. But I would like to use this as the basis for documentation of Tiddlywiki designed to supplement the official docs.

I love the fact that https://tiddlywiki.com serves all the roles it does, but that multi-focus means that it is not ideal as a documentation tool.

For example, the issue referred to in the OP:

I have a tiddler tagged $:/tags/ViewTemplate. But I would like it only to appear in tiddlers that have either tag foo or tag bar. And be invisible for all other tiddlers. Is this possible? I always thought “conditional viewtemplate” did this, but it turns out it does not.

is an important one to me. I figured this out quite a while ago. I don’t remember how – probably from a question here, or from someone’s example wiki.1 This may well be something findable in the main documentation, but I have no clue how to go about finding it there. My first attempt, searching for ViewTemplate hide yields these:

Of those, only the first is even slightly promising, but I did check them all, and none offer any help with this. Searching just on ViewTemplate yields 24 results, none of which looks likely.
I didn’t check them all, but I did look at two that I – knowing the solution – thought might be helpful:

But they didn’t give a hint. Introduction to Lists didn’t even mention what I see as one of their key features: TW’s usual conditional rendering technique.

Note that I don’t blame anyone for this. https://tiddlywiki.com is a tour de force. But serving so many roles while trying not to become overwhelming, it probably can’t serve the role I’m looking for. (However, if I get this off the ground and we want to fold some or all of it back into TW, I’d be ecstatic.)

So… no announcement yet. I’m am still mostly thinking about this. But I will probably start working soon, and I’d love suggestions.2


1 And I’m still amused and amazed to find that I knew this and Dave G didn’t; he’s one of those who’s taught me so much about TW!

2 I mean beyond the obvious suggestion of grabbing every post by @EricShulman, @pmario, and @saqimtiaz, and a few others as the main content!

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#7

Yes I do. It was in Grok Tiddlywiki, I’m pretty sure.

#8

Thanks Scott! Socrates’ quote applies to me: “I only know that I know nothing”