since the last time we spoke
I didn’t mention it, but I had two guesses (I think you’re the only one to have talked with me about https://talk.tiddlywiki.org/ until recently).
what advice, tips, or insight would you offer someone less experienced with using a tiddlywiki for long term use? like naming conventions, structuring, that sorta thing
I’m going to write muh long-winded gibberish here, and please feel free to ignore it. I’ll do my best to answer your questions, but I doubt I have any cleanly satisfying answers for you.
I have been asked this many times over the years, and I’ve thought about it plenty throughout the wiki. I still feel unqualified to answer it well. First, I’m not programmatically skilled with TW or web development, and I think my skiddie opinion about your question deserves some doubt for that reason; it may be a far more useful tool in the hands of many others I’ve encountered over the years. I can also say that many people don’t have the same goals or logistical requirements that I have in mind, and that may significantly influence the fitting answers to your question. I’m a zealot, including about what I think consists in making [[good]] use of this tool, so my opinion should be taken with an extra huge grain of salt. Text is king to my eyes, so I probably don’t value what many might about TW, nor do I stick with it for reasons that most would. I think TW can be exceptional for readers, ownership of the means of production (including distribution), those with strong spatial reasoning and memory, and non-technical writers (including myself). TW has just enough batteries-loaded boxes to help you be creative and perhaps more likely to default to doing close to the right thing to efficiently find the right way out of those boxes through use, but I think its flexibility is part of what makes answering your question generally or definitively pretty difficult.
For some people, if they aren’t publishing with others in mind, I think mostly plaintext files with a proper text editor and strong command line tooling is better than Tiddlywiki (I have little hope for browsers, the next gen cross-platform terminals, at this point, though I am an incompetent fan of [[Nyxt]]), especially if they’ve understood what they like about Tiddlywiki. For my offspring (who have each written ~10MBish public TWs before the age of 14), I would prefer they pour their time into their [[OS|NixOS]] and something like neovim, sublime text, or emacs, with custom tooling from the ground up for their private text work. For those willing to put in the effort (work which is minimized by LLMs at this point), TW is often worse for an author, archivist, or data transformer than other more agnostic tooling options. At some level of investment, I think the non-author is the primary beneficiary of TW.
For naming, I tend to stick to what I call dynamic and static tiddlers:
Dynamic tiddlers are like the clumping garden I grow, and static tiddlers tend to form the streams. That’s probably an oversimplification, as I see streams of chronological thought given sets of my dynamic tiddlers, too.
If I understand correctly, technically, you can do all your [[tagging|Tagging Theory]] and fieldish work in the title (though, I have some very long titles, and I’ve found it sometimes problematic). I prefer tiddler titles that encourage me to crystallize and recompress the content, provide footholds while searching lists, and increase the odds that I’ll remember.
I think there’s something to be said for minimizing your orphans and working toward connecting all the dots, but I’ve sort of a unificationist approach. One commenter has said that I’m trying to stuff an entire universe into this document.
Of course, I’m more likely to ask you why you are doing anything at all. What’s the point in using TW or your computer? The how matters far less than the why (or in virtue of it). It is there that I would suggest a person write every day. Don’t play a toolporn game. Don’t worry about making it beautiful or even fun. It’s not so much about productivity or collecting objects, and far more concerned with engaging in an explorative and transformative process itself. Work on what matters in your shoes, even when you don’t want to. Your TW is a communication device with yourself and others. What’s worth thinking about, holding yourself accountable to, and [[reconstructing]] between yourself and others? Find and do that. That is my primary advice, [[WINTCIS]].
If you were to give a tour of sorts of your wiki, where would you recommend someone to start?
That’s a really hard problem. I’m probably not going to be terribly useful to you here, like I’m stacking gibberish on top of more gibberish. /smh
.
The [[Readme]] is my first suggestion. I wish I knew how to give an ideal tour of it even to any given individual, let alone larger sets of people. I’ve seen my fair share of people who say my work cannot feasibly be summed up or categorized (I’m not claiming that, but I can appreciate why it’s hard to describe and navigate). There are also places meant for experts or individuals, and I’ve had to make perhaps absurd assumptions about what my reader understands or can parse. I’m on the hunt for what matters most as best I can, and I [[hope]] my readers and interlocutors do the same in their exploration.
I usually click through at random and just sort of read as I go, I’m afraid I haven’t deciphered your tabs yet haha
Consistently reading [[New]] or [[Recent]] will make it so you don’t fall behind, but catching up is no simple task (e.g. even peeled apart from its context in the rest of the wiki, digesting just the [[Link Log]] alone is a monumental task in itself). I think of the work as having a clear linear timeline (paranoically so). It has a very strong journal component to it, and I don’t think the work can be well understood without that mindset and interpretation. The reasons to wander it non-linearly are likely highly particularized to one’s context.
I can’t say all my tabs have retained their usefulness over time, and only some of them are used every day. I’d very much like to see how other people organize their sidebars. It’s hard to do well, imho.
In the end, I think artificially intelligent beings will be the only agents to cover all the ground thoroughly multiple times (including the snapshots). I think they will provide far better bridges into, analysis, impersonations, and translations of my work than even I could. I’m looking forward to the evolution of [[Aispondence]]; I’ve been writing with machine learning in mind for a long time now. It’s happening much sooner than I anticipated though (I continue to be wrong or at least inaccurate again and again).
What got you started with your wiki?
The first tiddler was [[2016.10.17 - Letter to Mom and Dad]]. [[⧖]] picks out the larger chronologically written story of the entire wiki (most every tiddler is hardcoded into it [upon each manual update], and it still takes ~3 seconds to load, compared to the macro that takes my machine ~40 seconds to generate), and why it continued and evolved as it did (as do the daily snapshots). At this point, I see my ℍ𝕪𝕡𝕖𝕣𝔱𝔢𝔵𝔱’s reason for existence as being causally overdetermined; there have been and remain multiple sufficient reasons for me to continue my work. How I got to the place where I began writing my ℍ𝕪𝕡𝕖𝕣𝔱𝔢𝔵𝔱 (originally h0p3’s Wiki) is a long story I’ve attempted to flesh out over the past 7 years. Unfortunately, it’s quite expensive to read (besides myself, there are probably only 3 people who have read even half of it).
As far as the size of your wiki… have you coinsidered segmenting or archiving parts of it? segmenting it into different sites and navigating between them like a traditional website might cut down on load times further if you do go the route of mario’s recommendations.
I have considered it. I think that would defeat much of the purpose of it. I’d probably be more inclined to export particular sections as their own child projects. I work hard to limit how my words can be taken out of context in a variety of settings. I’ll agree, however, that for almost any given problem, if there’s anything useful in what I’ve written at all, most of the wiki is either seemingly unrelated ephemeral appearing cruft or indirectly serving as background language use for definitions and context.
Though, keyword might- I know from my own experiences with TOR nodes, no matter how optimized the website, there’s always going to be a bit of a delay on loading due to the design of it. A worthwhile tradeoff if you ask me
Agreed. The latency trade-off is necessary. Though JS is not recommended for the Tor browser (and, some folk deny it should ever be used, XD), Whonix does a fine job. Once it is loaded (curl over socks5 is solid), TW performance is a clientside matter, and, for longer sessions, TW demolishes most of the other options for serving over Tor. That is one of the reasons I have chosen to use this tool: it doesn’t punish people seeking [[anonymity]], [[privacy]], or offline control. I’m a long-time contributor to the Tor network, and I’ve found very few sites last; TW makes it easy to archive and own the means of production, serving the author and the user well, imho.