InfoSelect is informative of why one would avoid proprietary solutions. I bought the product, and almost the next day they changed their business plan, quadrupling the price of future upgrades. My sense is that it hasn’t experienced a lot of uptake, and it would fail the “man on the street” test. And of course, it’s single-platform.
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The 2nd sentence is pretty clear:
Welcome to TiddlyWiki, a unique non-linear notebook for capturing, organising and sharing complex information.
Once again, we have no data-driven evidence that there is anything wrong with uptake of TW, other than that it doesn’t advertise. If people make decisions about a product based on a screen layout, they will certainly make decisions based on a name. And the name is the speed bump for about 300 million English speaking people. Or, at least I think it is. But I can’t prove it because we have no data.
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Right. They whacked up pricing and they changed it.
TBH, I used it most when it was DOS based. The Windows thing got expensive and less flexible.
(Footnote: I found it interesting that [reductive] “column search” in @BurningTreeC’s MCL is exactly like InfoSelect was on Windows 3 
)
I would like to see this split off into another topic. I think there is real value in changing the homepage, not particularly with this use of a CSS framework, but the overall and structure content of HelloThere. Especially the section titled “Customize TiddlyWiki for any usecase you can imagine”. For example under the Zettelkasten section, we can link out to some of the example editions.
Back to the topic of growth, I think fast growth for the sake of growth is not what TiddlyWiki is about. TiddlyWiki is about the long view. I assume TW will still be around 25 years from now. I would be cautious about analytics. TW is privacy conscious by design. I don’t see how collecting data about visitors supports that (implied) valued of user privacy.
Because its aggregate. And opt-out. And because conversations like this happen over and over, and yet we lack the data to show that there is actually any ongoing difficulty. I’m pretty sure that there is a major demographic that is under-represented. But we have no numbers.
When I think of privacy, I think of trackers and information-sharing among advertisers. But I don’t worry about “someone from Elbonia visited 6 times and downloaded once in the last week.”
As for growth – apparently some people want to see more uptake.
This is why I put implied in parentheses. I assume TiddlyWiki.com is not collecting detailed user data. see Jeremy’s post here about removing Google Analytics. You’re right some may not worry about such broad high level tracking details, but I am skeptical about what insight there is to glean from this. I myself might visit TiddlyWiki.com from my work computer everyday to lookup something and it’s location does not match my actual location due to the way the network operates. But if there are any analytics used, then they should be privacy respecting as possible. And from what I can tell from a quick search, there are tools that are privacy respecting and do not require a cookie banner.
Unless you have a very long commute, you visit from the same country every day. Probably the same city. That’s the stats we need – how many visits by geo-graphic region.
Honestly, this privacy thing seems like OCD writ large. And it doesn’t tackle the real infringements – the financial companies who apparently can do anything they want with your data with no repercussions.
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I loathe the practice of opt-in by default (except for things that lockdown by default for the purpose of security). I much prefer opted-out by default, and invited to opt-in.
Just quickly saying, because opt-in by default might be worth a dedicated discussion on an “opt-in by default” case by case basis.
I understand the feeling. Especially with stack-exchange, where every single time I have to reset the settings.
I think we would end up with almost no usable statistics. Only committed TW people would opt-in. Leaving out the most valuable demographic. I guess what I would want is to try it opt-out for say, 3 months, and then look at the stats and see if they are useful. Then drop them and re-instate every year or so. Sort of like the equivalent of a pledge-drive.
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Then them are the breaks.
Get people to opt-in with a carrot of some kind. Even if just a “star” for helping out, with a public display of a user’s number of stars. Can turn into a little bit of a competition to get them stars. (Duolingo does little achievement rewards to encourage folk.)
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All of those projects are … funded in some way where people have full time jobs making the home page.
Yep I’m sure things could be done to make TW — an open source project with one (1) “full time” person on it — more approachable.
If you (or anyone else) would like to design a landing page for TW — go for it!
Want a dedicated space in #projects to have a set of people to work on this? Yes! Go for it!
Will Jeremy accept such a new landing page? Maybe! It’s a process and starts by having some folks volunteer and do some work.
And of course, there are people like @abesamma that are building products around TW — see https://oneplaybook.app/ — which are much more focused landing pages.
As has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I think a group of folks making an Edition — and shaping it with defaults and out of the box settings that they think are good — would be the easiest path, including to not have to replace what is on TW right away.
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Actually, the process should start with Jeremy explaining the purpose of the landing page. Musts and must-nots. Otherwise there’s a big chance people put a lot of effort into creating a fantastic but wrong thing.
tiddlywiki.com serves the needs of several distinct but overlapping groups of users:
- It is the landing page first encountered by prospective users
- It is the online demo for prospective users to explore
- It is the online documentation reference for current users
- It is the community test bed for quick tests and proof-of-concepts
And perhaps there are more. The point here is that any redesign should not unknowingly make tiddlywiki.com less useful for any of these groups of users.
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@jeremyruston has the idea of moving some of these functions to tiddlywiki.org progressed?
I think everyone wants to address these goals but also improve its appeal to naive visitors. However as tiddlywiki has being used as a reference for sometimes we do not want to invalidate such links.
Yes, I’ve started moving community organisation stuff to tiddlywiki.org, and we already moved links out to links.tiddlywiki.org but I don’t think that any of the use cases I mentioned above are expected to move to tiddlywiki.org
My writing here sometimes serve a “hidden” purpose, which is to discover the whats, what-nots, whos and whys about the community and software. If I propose or oppose something, I’m both giving my feedback about some implementation detail and waiting to see what the response tells me about the community.
This kind of dynamic is much harder in a digital discussion forum, but the purpose is the same as in physical meetings at a company. It’s not just facts and figures, it’s also about who you should be talking to, what’s the general direction of the work, what are the recurring themes, why are they doing this, what do they believe in and so on.
So if I throw out a few crazy ideas, I don’t expect someone else to make them come true. A great answer could maybe be,
- Yes, that is a good idea, because it aligns with our values and the current roadmap, that you can find here
- Maybe you could cooperate with NN on this, who is already very knowledgeable in the area?
- See this link for more information about contributing to the software or community
Or, of course, “No, we don’t want to do that, because X”. Or “Not now, but can you create an issue on Github, so we can revisit this in 6 months?”
Since I don’t hear that, I’m still trying to find out how I can contribute.
I’m giving you feedback as what is missing … which is people picking up some responsibilities and getting stuff done 
From GitHub to home pages, Jeremy could use some self directed volunteers. If you’re interested in taking things on — go for it!
Yes and no Who is the audience is the starting point for a landing page for sure.
But maybe it doesn’t go on the dotCom home page but rather elsewhere, and we ask Jeremy for a subdomain.
Thanks for digging into this @twMat and kicking off a community project.
I revisited this reply of @cdaven because of @eduardo.caiojoao30’s mention.
What dawned on me is these are “landing pages”, and need not be the whole website.
- It should be quite easy to provide a way to deliver tiddlywiki in a different layout as a landing page and for selected tiddlers but also return to the standard layout when you navigate elsewhere.
- That is for the general audience or new visitor they see something akin to a regular website, but it is only a shell.
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