Do We Need to Have TiddlyWiki Books?

#5

I’m a huge fan of physical books. My technical bookshelf is large, and my personal ones are scattered in every room in the house. But I can’t really see the use of a physical book for TW, which is all about interactivity and personalization. I think Soren Bjornstad’s approach in Grok TiddlyWiki, using Tiddlywiki to present itself is more appropriate. I think there is room for many other approaches too, but, while I’d love to see one succeed, I can’t really imagine a physical book covering TW well.

Do you mean this?: TiddlyWiki - Wikibooks, open books for an open world

#6

Thank you for sharing this.

But I mean this one:

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I found the link here

kewapo/The-Tiddlywiki-Manual (github.com)

It has been developed in LaTeX, but I think it was later moved into TiddlyWiki

#8

Remember in tiddlywiki interactive smart documents are in many (not all) ways better than books. Dont forget @EricShulman https://tiddlytools.com/ but I am having trouble finding the newer version.

#9

Are you referring to Inside TiddlyWiki — A Guide for Users, Authors, Designers and Developers?

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#10

Yes I am. A Very good interactive book.

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#11

I was very excited to see this, but then disappointed that the chapter I was most interested in – Programming for TiddlyWiki – was still to be done. It looks to be full of useful information, though, and I look forward to going through it. Thanks for sharing!

#12

I’m also in favor of a book, a TiddlyWiki manual that can encapsulate everything in a digestible mainstreamed way would be really useful.

If I remember correctly I have an incomplete edition of this, however I haven’t seen any news of it in some time :confused: I had a lot of hope for it. Could we use the github repo to recreate it and host an archive of it on tiddlyhost, or would that encroach on the author?

I had no clue you had such a thing available, I think I’ll have a nice read of that during my lunch today :grin:

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#13

Does anyone wonder why Obsidian in 3 years has more 3 times as many books as TW in 15?

Choosing the right name for a product makes all the difference in the world. It’s like a catalyst in chemistry. Just a tiny bit of a substance makes the difference between whether a reaction happens at all, or if it rapidly converts all the reagents.

And yes, there are commercial products wiith poor names (Yahoo, Twitter), but they either advertised or filled a market niche when there were no other contending products. Today there are dozens of note-taking applications. And TW has no marketing budget. So when people compare 5 or 6 products on a chart, they get mental fatigue and decide to try out the product with the cooler name. They never get around to trying out the product with the amateur name.

We live in a world of constant marketing. To not understand the effect of marketing on personal choices is like a fish not knowing that it lives in water.

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#14

How do you tease apart the effects, though?

Certainly the name has been some sort of drag, although it’s not at all clear how much. But how does that compare to the lack of a well-funded marketing campaign? I’m guessing the latter is more important to adoption rate, but I have no hard evidence of this. And you also have to figure in the learning curve. TW is so powerful, but it takes a long time to gain expertise.

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#15

I think it is mainly the no advertising of TW that hurts it so much, not so much it’s name.

Not to mention that it is so dynamic and unique in it’s design that new users might struggle to comprehend it, and given that it uses it’s own markup, functions, filtering system and a non-structured way of instructions on the main site, I can imagine many people feel a bit lost until they find their way.

EDIT: I just asked GPT 4 how it would “make TW as big as Obs.Md”, and… I think it’s onto something.

I’ll summarize it, because it gave… a lot.

  • Marketing and Community Building
  • Streamlined modern UI
  • Easier learning by tutorials and navigation
  • Mobile support, such as mobile UI layout
  • Built in collaborative features
  • Uniform formats for plugins and (i think it was trying to include stylesheets but it but css formats?)

Most of the community has these things, but all soft of… scattered about. I imagine getting them all in one spot would put TW in a nice spot, but the lack of advertising is still a big problem :thinking:

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#16

The main one is that there is no official Android/iPhone version of the software. Of course, you don’t need that – but people in a hurry don’t get that. And then they see the name “TiddlyWiki” and think, “Oh, it’s just some toy project.” And they move on.

Obsidian is really good about consolidating add-ons. There is an interface inside the product that allows you to instantly search, find, and install rated and vetted community plugins. (They’re only vetted once, but still). You don’t have to look all over the net at dozens of uniquely formatted websites to find a feature that you want. And community plugins that are really popular eventually get made into official plugins – something I’ve never seen with TW.

Getting back to the topic of books, having a consolidated, official interface for plugins also makes it easy to write about installing plugins.

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#17

Quick note: I understand this resource may not be very recently updated (and need not be for most introductory purposes)… but this talk.tiddlywiki.org site would be good to add here in the section pointing to online groups!

#18

Just to be sure. You may know: https://tiddlywiki.com/dev/ already. It’s some low level info I also use to see how things are designed. There is some very early info, but all in all it’s also kept up to date, if the info is to “cryptic” for the main docs.

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#19

Yes, I do, and I look at it occasionally. Thank you.

#20

Books are mainly needed when the community is large or growing rapidly. TiddlyWiki needs a small step to join in the virtuous cycle. IMHO, a better UI/UX is crucial because it acts as other points ( name, adversiting, …) that can attract new users.

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#21

Not to self-promote, but it would be cool if there was a tiddlywiki book using something like my Tiddly2PDF to provide a document version. That way it could have the interactivity of a wiki with a document version if people prefer it that way, or wish to print it.

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#22

Also “not to self-promote”, but my Inside TiddlyWiki — A Guide for Users, Authors, Designers and Developers already produces “printer-ready” output, suitable for using “save as PDF” to create a stand-alone PDF file. Just click the “print entire book” icon in the upper-left toolbar. This will open a separate “Inside TiddlyWiki - Print Preview” window.

Then, from that window, click the printer icon in the upper-right corner. This will trigger your system-based print dialog, with proper application of the page-break:after; CSS attribute so that each logical “book page” will be printed on a separate piece of paper (with overflow to additional printed pages as needed for longer content). There are currently 95 book pages generated by the print output.

In the options provided by the Windows system-based print dialog, you can then select a destination of “save as PDF” to create a stand-alone PDF file. I would guess that other platforms (e.g., Apple or Unix) probably have similar system-based print options as well.

enjoy,
-e

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#23

You can fork the repo and create your own archive. The html file alco can be saved on Tiddlyhost.

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#24

Would you happen to have a solution to using your reference tiddlywiki on mobile? It’s pretty jam packed aith other ui elements and bit difficult to navigate.

#25

Not to be too dismissive of the large number of books available for Obsidian, but how many of those books are really adding anything new and substantive or were they just made for SEO purposes?

I really don’t know a lot about Obsidian, but its just what I infer from those book covers.

Not that TiddlyWiki couldn’t benefit from a book, it is a sort of measure of popularity, but there’s so much potential material to cover. Giving the subject of the book a specific use case also might make it easier to have a book on the subject. For example there could be a “How to create a Zettelkasten with TiddlyWiki” or “How to get started with GTD with TiddlyWiki” (the MonkeyGTD TiddlyWiki was one of the first projects I remember seeing use TiddlyWiki before I started using TiddlyWiki myself.