How to have a path/title shortener in TiddlyWiki? This is similar to URL shortener (e.g. Shortened URL (shorturl.at))
Usecase:
There are templates developed by community members where they are distributed in Plugins where titles are very long. If there is a path/title shortener we use can use them easier.
Examples 1
Instead of : {{myTiddler || $:/plugins/this-publisher/that-plugin/templates/pretty}}
user can use just: {{myTiddler || su.pretty }}
here su is just a suggested prefix like https://shorturl. when using shortener url.
Examples 2
Instead of : <$list filter="[tag[myTags]]" template="$:/plugins/this-publisher/that-plugin/templates/pretty" />
user can use just <$list filter="[tag[myTags]]" template="su.pretty" />
here su is just a suggested prefix like https://shorturl. when using shortener url.
Remarks
It is known that one can create a new tiddler (e.g. pretty) with short title and put {{$:/plugins/this-publisher/that-plugin/templates/pretty}} as text . Then use renamed/aliases template like {{myTiddler || pretty }}
This is not good because of maintainability and the manual work
It is known that plugin developers can include template like pretty without namespace.
This is not recommended and will cause if several plugins share the same name as pretty
This may be solved using alises, so a tiddler with a very long title can have aliases. But this is not supported by TiddlyWiki yet.
Here’s some previous discussion of this idea, in case it inspires any new ideas! I thought @pmario took an interesting approach in post #16 and #17 in particular; I’m not sure whether he developed it any further.
I think #17 was the final thought, but I did not develop anything. I did have a short look again, if it can be resolved using wikitext. It may be, but it’s complex. A new operator expand eg: [<shortTitle>expand[configTiddler]] should do the trick.
I suppose it depends on why you want the shorter links
To give you shortlinks to share but not readable like bit.ly etc
To take a long title and reduce it to a shorter readable and meaningful link
I have made a solution that works surprisingly well, create a second tiddler with the short title that masquerades as its original tiddler.
Following the short link opens what looks like the full tiddler.
With relink in place you can rename either title but it’s wise not to let published short names renamed because “the link is out there” and should remain
I can understand the desire. IMO there are 2 things we need to know:
A)
It has to be very clear: Title-shortening trades compatibility for convenience.
The reason, why plugins and the TW $:/core have a somewhat “bulky” naming scheme $:/plugins/<publisher>/<plugin-name>/<tiddler/title> is to avoid naming problems.
The core is “bulky” so users can use “simple” naming, without the “fear” to cause naming problems with the $:/core and 3rd-party plugins.
B) It adds a performance overhead
In your “Example 1” both transclusion strings are valid. So there is and never will be an indicator, that su.pretty is a shortened tiddler title.
Title detection will look like this: (simplified)
Some core function needs to test if the template tiddler exists
If it exists → show it → Done
3.0 If it does not exist atm it fails silently → Done
Now it needs to look up the template and create the “long title”
With the long title goto 2.
So instead of 3 steps worst case and 2 steps best case – It now has: 6 steps worse case and 5 steps best case. – That’s a significant difference even with highly simplified “steps”.
So the “syntax” needs to be much more “specific”, so the $:/core does know early, that it gets a “shortend” title. So we can dirctly start at step 3) for a “short title”
IMO the only manageable way to go is, that the TW parser can already “lengthen” the title. Since the parse-tree is cached, the “new code” would only need to be “executed” once.
If the shortening is done at render-time where will be a lot of different widgets involved. So imo it would be a huge change.
@Mohammad and @pmario it is my belief that this question is effectively solved already, and at most could be tweaked to be even more functional.
How?
Thus either with a click or using another mechanism we create the tiddler su.pretty and that contains {{||$:/plugins/this-publisher/that-plugin/templates/pretty}}.
Using it;
Thus transcluding {{myTiddler || su.pretty }} returns the content of the long title tiddler.
using my masquerade solution opening su.pretty or using a link for example https://tiddlywiki.com/su.pretty will open the tiddler but it will “look like” $:/plugins/this-publisher/that-plugin/templates/pretty
A mechanism to ensure the content of su.pretty to be updated if the long title changes but lock the short title so it cant be renamed would be helpful.
because if one publishes the “short link” https://tiddlywiki.com/su.pretty on the internet, in emails etc… you want it to remain valid.
An alternative is to instead publish a link containing a search mechanism
Html has a range of redirect methods, we may be able to incorporate these into the way tiddlywiki works
PHP Redirects should work even to different tiddler addresses in tiddlywiki.
The code does not work as requested in the OP. But if su.pretty contains this transclusion: {{||$:/plugins/this-publisher/that-plugin/templates/pretty}} – It does work as expected by the OP. eg:
Create a tiddler: x with text: {{||$:/core/ui/TagTemplate}}
