Links Tiddlywiki: How does it work?

#21

As @saqimtiaz says, we welcome improvements to TiddlyWiki Links. The issues that @stobot mentioned are all things that would be nice to improve:

  • Introducing topic aliases mappings, so that we can regularise the topics applied to incoming links. For example, we currently have the tags “business_examples”, “example wiki”, “examples”, “examples-education” and “examples-personal”, which could be cleaned up to appear as a single “example” tag, with secondary tags for “business” and “education”
  • Introducing user feedback features like voting etc. needs some more work on the backend, which is part of the motivation for the exploration that @saqimtiaz has been doing on automating GitHub submissions
  • Layout improvements. I also struggle to remember where to click when presented with the page about a particular link. It’s all done in TiddlyWiki, just a bunch of templates, so anyone should be able to make improvements
#22

Hello Mark,
I myself am not confused, but I asked to have a simpler doc, description for non technical people who need to create a GitHub account to collaborate!
Also some features need to be explained, like encouraging users to bookmark their favorite sites (tools, editions, plugins,…) which can be used as a measure for rating!

I read the messages in this thread and now for me it is more clear how Links work!

Thank you all!

#23

Thank you @stobot. I really enjoyed reading your comments! I hope Links get improved as it can serve as a community resource!

1 Like
#24

Oh, I thought it was done with some other process/technology. There’s a separate GH for it, presumably?

#25

There is indeed:

#26

I’ve spent this morning working on a mockup of an alternative layout per my suggestions to get input on, and noticed something that we might want to mention in the “about” area. There’s sometimes many different “links” to different content, but with the same URL. When trying to “debug” this, I can see how this is happening… I think instances like the below should have a URL submitted to the actual tiddler, but it’s only filled in for the site itself. I can’t see in the about area if this is considered right or wrong, but I think the site would be more useful if the URLs went right to the content/tiddler. Where this is coming up is a “Popular” view in which I’m trying to expose which tiddlers overall have the most links pointed to it, and right now, this one says 9 because of this.

image

1 Like
#27

Hi @stobot the system does normalise URLs, but it does not strip any location hash (ie the part after the hash). For example, see http://80.56.108.132/TW5/TW5_playground.html#Exploration%20plugin: links.tiddlywiki.com — TiddlyWiki community links.

In this case I think Mark’s original links do not include a tiddler reference. For example:

https://marxsal.github.io/tw-resources/#Bookmarklet%20macro%20(WRT2)

#28

Apologies, the first link above should have been http://80.56.108.132/TW5/TW5_playground.html#Exploration%20plugin: links.tiddlywiki.com — TiddlyWiki community links

#29

Oh, I’m posting a link like https://links.tiddlywiki.com/urls/3aa7ec3d0fe2f42b0ea2/ and Discourse helpfully replaces the link text with the title of the page, which confused me…

#30

Thanks @jeremyruston - sorry for the confusion, but I was more intending to suggest adding something “rules-wise” about using specific (not sure what descriptor fits here) urls in the instructions. I didn’t even think that it might be the aggregator process itself, so thank you for checking that.

Long and the short of it, for future contributors (or marxsal in the one specific case above), just note that giving a tiddler-specific url will give a richer experience in the future as it will better allow the most popular resources/links to stand out a bit more clearly. Thanks!

#31

On (or slightly off) topic of style…
In The individual wiki the tiddler contains a brief description and the url goes in a field.
But as I’m also using my bookmark wiki as my own bookmark wiki this means I have to open the tiddler into edit mode and then manually copy and paste the link.

It would be much easier to click the link directly in my tiddler, but that would mess with the big list.

Any way I can have my cake and eat it or would it just be ok to include a link in the description?

#32

I spent hours trying to find the most precise addresses and eliminating duplicates. I’m sure there’s some mistakes, but in this case tiddlystuff was made before permalinks were available, so the site itself is the most specific url.

#33

I built a simple mockup of a tweaked links.tiddlywiki.com incorporating some of my suggestions. The mockup is not fully fleshed out, but curious if there’s any support for a UI simplification.

Mockup is here:
https://community-links.tiddlyhost.com/

I did a short video walkthrogh here:

#34

Your own bookmark TW is just like any other TW. So you can add a view template that exposes your URL for launching. This shouldn’t affect Jeremy’s link hoovering since the template doesn’t change the actual source tiddler.

#35

That is how I have it set up:
https://saq-twlinks.tiddlyhost.com/

See the tiddler $:/sq/ui/LinksViewTemplate

The ugly but effective “new link” button is handy too.

#36

Thanks for that @Mark_S and @saqimtiaz. Template mode engaged!

#37

Coat-tailing off this topic - I see most people created a new wiki just for sharing their links. Is this a requierment or can any existing wiki site be used? I don’t really want to maintain a second (or more) online wiki just for a few links.

#38

The system works by retrieving the entire wiki every 20 minutes to extract the tiddlers tagged $:/tags/Link, so it is inefficient if the wiki contains a lot of extraneous information. I think most contributors are using a dedicated links wiki.

1 Like
#39

Maybe there could be an option to fetch a static .json file of the links rather than fetching the entire wiki. That way we can still maintain our links collection, and share them by exporting to a hosted file.

#40

Yes indeed, we could add support for JSON bundles of links tiddlers, and I’d be happy to do so if it helped. But to note that it would be just as easy for people to export to the TW HTML file format instead, which is already supported.