Showcasing community creations on tw.com

#1

@stobot has recently posted some stunning demos showing the power of the drag and drop capabilities enabled by the <$eventcatcher> widget.

I think it would be very desirable to bring community creations like this to a wider audience. We have an “Examples” tiddler that is intended as a showcase but it has proved less than popular. We’ve also got https://links.tiddlywiki.org/ where it is coming up to a year since the last update.

What would it take to fix this?

Perhaps we need a volunteer to be the editor of an updated community showcase. It wouldn’t necessarily be hugely demanding. At its simplest, it would be a matter of adding anything that gets a lot of engagement here. Long threads like the one around @stobot’s demo are a powerful signal that there is something interesting there.

Another possibility would be to pull the latest content from https://links.tiddlywiki.org and present it prominently on https://tiddlywiki.com. This has only fairly recently become viable thanks to the great work that people like @saqimtiaz and @linonetwo have done on improving our build process.

I’m open to other ideas, but whatever we decide I think it’s going to need volunteers to step up and make it happen. We all want TiddlyWiki to be a success. One aspect of that is to communicate clearly to prospective users what makes TiddlyWiki different from other note taking tools. I think that that is because it is really a construction kit enabling non-developers to build a useful class of personal web applications for themselves or others. It’s a fairly unique niche and it would be great to shout a little more about it.

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#2

pull the latest content from https://links.tiddlywiki.org

This is a good idea, I’d like to recommend showing thing on other websites, like Quora or Reddit, instead on our own website, so more people can hear us.
@jeremyruston do you use those social media and article platfrom? As creator, you article and words have more weight, and you could invite us to upvote you on other platfrom.

If you setup “join question” in Discord server (if you own that server, I don’t know), you could know where people comes from. As far as I know from my QQ group question, most people comes from Zhihu (Quora alternative) post and questions, few from tutorial website, and gradually growing more from asking AI.

Maybe we need to spread more information around the internet to let AI know it is important (AEO). And from experience, upload article to those website with recommend engine is also efficent, like Medium or NewsBreak.

I always want to setup an LLM agent to auto pull things, and create article, then post to other social website or “recommend engine websites”. As developers, we like to spend time on coding, so maybe let code do the posting job.

#3

To be fair, right now that tiddler buried; to find it from the main TOC, you need to hit Community > Resources > Examples or Welcome > Community > Resources > Examples. And Examples is one of eleven entries in Resources, Resources is one of sixteen in Community, and Community is one of seven entries in Welcome and one of thirteen in TableOfContents.

It also is old. The entries in Examples have timestamps of 4-, 4-, 9- 10-, 10-, 11-, 11-, and 12-years ago. I agree that it would be wonderful to build a better mechanism, one that doesn’t forget our old work, but easily incorporates fresh material.

To my mind, the best place to showcase TiddlyWiki would be the HelloThere tiddler on tiddlywiki.com. Here’s one possibility (for the display; see below about item collection): we could add a carousel to the bottom of HelloThere, with 10-15 thumbnails of showcase items, ideally including very different-looking
items. We display 1 - 5 of them at once, depending on screen size, and every five to ten seconds, we animate a shift to the aperture, hiding the first one and showing the next one in the list. Of course they are clickable links to tiddlers with more information. (These might link to a separate showcase wiki, so we don’t clutter up the main site with too many of these.)

As for collecting them, I would hope that Discourse and Discord (and possibly GitHub) allow similar bots, to publish a poll, perhaps biweekly, allowing users to vote on (say) up to three items to include in our showcase, with newly added ones staying on for three or so cycles, and some more random mechanism to also sprinkle older ones among them. I don’t yet have a good idea for a nomination mechanism. I feel it should never require the attention of any one specific individual, but if there is a way a group of three or four people could be notified that it’s time to sort out the results and choose the list for the next fortnight, I think we might have a viable mechanism on our hands. My goal would be that the only manual work would be for any community members to vote on their preferred items and every two weeks or so for one of a small group of people to validate that nominations are appropriate and to tweak any of the algorithm’s output necessary.

To do this would require proving out a showcase carousel, and investigating writing bots, plus storing the results somewhere. Something like Google docs? Perhaps a CSV in GitHub the bots could append to? It’s substantial work, but doesn’t sound overwhelming.

It extends beyond non-developers. I don’t know how many other users are themselves web developers, but I’ve been a developer for decades, focused for more than 20 years on creating web apps, in a huge variety of languages and frameworks. TiddlyWiki is a platform for me too. I’ve found a great number of projects which have worked better with TiddlyWiki.

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#4

Yes!

I see three dimensions of challenge:

  1. Identifying the audience(s) for this showcase (Some would love to see high-gloss content-oriented demos — ones that are like a breath of fresh air: “I see what ordinary need this fills, and gosh this design is so intuitive and friendly!”. Some would be most curious about pushing TiddlyWiki’s internal structure in inspiring ways. Others would be most excited by stuff that shows off integrations with tech-tools and workflows from beyond TiddlyWiki. )

  2. Curating the showcase wikis to keep them finite and not just a sea of links… (This means letting go of some examples in favor of others. This is hard because we each presumably find our own lived-in wiki layouts and affordances to be perfectly intuitive, while we can’t help but to judge others to be too noisy or too dull. We each also have our favored niches of content.)

  3. Weeding (Keeping the showcase free of examples that need maintenance or updates.)

One thought is: What if the showcase had three (?) “columns” — each with a different “editor” who’s thinking about the audience appetite for and likely engagement with the examples:

Category One:

  • recipes
  • biblio database
  • periodic table of elements
  • bible verses
  • artworks
  • genealogy
  • to-do list

Category Two:

  • Volant or movable post-its
  • Drawing-board /graphic-editing interfaces
  • gaming interfaces
  • TiddlyMap– and other diagramming-oriented tools
  • Timeline tools, GANTT charts, ambitious real-time calendar interfaces
  • Radical rethinkings of the role and implementation of core TW elements: field-design, parallel-story-river designs, tags/flags experiments, Streams-like rethinking of GUI and role of titles…

Category Three:

  • Here I imagine wikis that mind-meld with aggregators, or handle online shopping like siniy-kit’s [old?] stuff, or integrate LLM tools in an inline way… Also, wikis with serious additional javascript content development that extends them in ways that TiddlyWiki wouldn’t otherwise reach…

Of course these categories aren’t neatly separate!

But I suspect that the kinds of things that say @linonetwo might pick out for a showcase would be pretty different from the things that I would pick out, and a good approach to showcases might work with that difference rather than against it. (I wouldn’t feel at all qualified to suss out a good vs bad implementation of certain technical features. But I do feel somewhat qualified to think about GUI clarity and workflow clarity for projects that are less code-intensive.)

On a personal level, there’s a related perennial challenge for me if I’m the developer of such a showcase site: These projects have harnessed our interest because of real-world jobs/projects/hobbies, and they may be solid at one level of development … still, at least in my case, I’m nearly always actively developing additional proof-of-concept or experimental layers.

Perhaps with this kind of showcase in mind, I would try to make a hosted clone of something like the biblio wiki in order to neaten it up to have (virtually) no loose ends, and as few plugins as possible. Then there would have to be some cue to revisit the showcase version, occasionally, to keep the core updated (unless something really requires holding it back), and to make any improvements that are essential to the wiki’s purpose, and that have survived the beta-development experience in my main working version.

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#5

This idea has been put forward before I think, but Tiddlyhost could be good place to showcase community creations. This doesn’t solve all the maintenance challenges, but I think it would allow more interested creators to more easily maintain and update their own creations.

There’s some discussion here about how it might look, but to summarize:

  • Imagine a special flag that could be bestowed on any public Tiddlyhost (by some authorized curator) that would make it appear on the “community showcase”.
  • There would need to be a person, or a group of people, responsible for applying that flag, and also for removing when needed.
  • An interesting or showcase-worthy site could be nominated informally, perhaps via this forum. Should it meet the criteria (whatever that may be), the special flag gets set in Tiddlyhost and the site will appear at https://tiddlyhost.com/community-showcase or whatever url is chosen.

That’s the core of the idea, but I can think of some ways to make it nicer, e.g

  • The description could be expanded for community showcase sites to add more detail about what makes them interesting.
  • The could be some kind of method for showing off the latest of a particular plugin, (or macro, or theme, etc) directly from GitHub, which might be a good way to help keep things fresh.
  • We could divide showcase items into categories such as the ones suggested by @Springer above.
  • There could be some “showcase of the month” style content, where a particular showcase gets a detailed write-up in a forum or blog post.

Anyway, let me know if this seems worth considering further. There’s a little work needed to implement some kind of UI for curators to set a “community showcase” flag, but the effort needed to get to a POC to see if we like would be pretty low.

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#6

The first time I got exposed to TW was by reading a reference on another website so I do agree that this method can attract users with the appropiate mindset to launch and try TW.

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