Suggestions for organizing knowledge tiddlers

#1

Hi,

i’m sure this has been asked a million times so at the risk of being ostracized and being banned from fire and water, i’m wrecking my brain on the sustainable way to organize my tiddlers. Most of them have to do with IT but they also have random pieces about philosophy, psychology, butI also take notes on random stuff like how to spell “bada bing bada boom”.

I’ve created the following top level categories :

  • Concepts
  • Commands (eg ldapsearch)
  • Languages (including human)
  • Tools

Then i drill down to the specifics by tagging the second level tiddlers with one of those four tags and creating third-level tiddlers that have the tag of the second-level tiddlers and so on.

For example: Commands (tag:Home) → ldapsearch (tag:Commands) → Authenticate with Kerberos (tag: ldapsearch).

That allows me to build a table of contents. But i’m stumbling upon cases where a Concept is also a Tool or a Command is also a Concept.

So i’m thinking maybe a tree is not the best way to structure the info. How would I for example categorize bada bing bada boom? Is that a Concept or part of Language? How would I find it later?

All of this is making me doubt my system. I know you might say do whatever works for you but i don’t want to do something against well established best practices.

If there are resources on this topic, I would be very grateful.

Thank you kindly

#2

Why not both?

I understand the struggle to force everything into a single tree, though. I started out trying to make a comprehensive TOC (because tiddlywiki.com has one, so that must be best-practice, right?) and eventually abandoned it for similar reasons. Here’s what works for me (on desktop):

  • I use the Command Palette plugin for most of my navigation: it lets me jump to a specific tiddler, search by keyword, or even write a search filter on the fly.
  • For browsing when I don’t know what exactly I’m looking for, I stole and modified the Thinkup plugin from @Mohammad’s excellent Mehregan Edition, which makes it quick to add new tiddlers to a category, and automatically adds comments, to-do-lists, and a node explorer to the bottom of each tiddler. Depending on your needs, you might want his subject index plugin as well… or just download the entire edition and import your existing content.
  • I’ve also taken some plugins from another great “starter” edition, @Eskha’s Delphes Notes - notably the Notes Menu and Tags Sidebar, which I find better organized and more useful than the default sidebar tags; the Breadcrumbs plugin; and “See also… for missing tiddlers”, which is great for reminding me where and why I linked to that non-existent tiddler, especially in conjunction with…
  • Auto Complete, which I’ve set up using some filters from the Relink plugin, so typing [[ gives me a dropdown list of both extant tiddlers and “missing” links that I’ve used before.

As you can see, this isn’t exactly a simple system, and it’s developed over a number of iterations. But I’m pretty satisfied with where it’s ended up, and—crucially for me—it gives me multiple ways to find the tiddlers I need, so I don’t have to remember whether I tagged the info I’m looking for as a “Tool” or a “Concept”.

I’d encourage you to browse some of the showcases and editions listed on this forum and on tiddlywiki.com and see what you like, what you don’t like, and what you wish you were already using. Then steal it and hack it into something that works better for you.

Oh, and if you don’t already have it, you should really grab Commander, which will be invaluable if and when you decide you want to make some structural changes. :slight_smile:

Edit: I should say, I do still have some tables of contents (though they’re tucked away in a tab I don’t use often.) But since they’re not my first stop when I need to find a tiddler, I don’t have to worry about getting my tags “perfect” and perfectly interconnected.

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#3

I agree with etardiff, just add both tags if both apply.

And you can have multiple tables of contents, one starting at each of the tags you mentioned.

<<toc "Concepts">> 

<<toc "Commands">>
#4

Also, if you don’t need a full tree, just a simple list of items tagged ‘Concepts’, I recommend the list-search macro by Tobias. It is really fast for finding things within a category. See Documenting TW — a non-linear personal web notebook. Also @Mohammad has an updated version of it. Find out more here: KISS Macro to Create a List-Search

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#5

@etardiff , thank you so very much for taking the time to outline your process – for free! Stuff like that should cost money :slight_smile: I’ve been using TW for years but only recently started diving under its hood and started asking myself whether what I’m doing is useful or rather how to improve my note taking. Been going through Grokking TW book.

So far it’s been overwhelming to just survey everything that is out there.

Thank you for your thoughts on TOCs, I knew pros must have used something better :slight_smile: I’m already using AutoComplete – it’s great. I will try Commander and Relink, both sound awesome.

I’ve checked out Soren’s tzk and I’m not sure how to modify my type of info to that system. I’ve also been meaning to better understand Mehregan – putting this on my list of things to do.

Thank you again!

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#6

Thank you @DaveGifford, the list-search thing is awesome – thank you for the tips, back to the fiddling!

#7

Oh, how do you install CommandPalette? I can’t find the instructions on that (I’m running my TW on NodeJS). Also the subject index plugin link is not opening for some reason?

#8

Oops, fixed that link.

I’m afraid I don’t know anything about NodeJS, but dragging and dropping the plugin directly into your wiki ought to work. (You probably know this already, but you can find the full list of plugins a wiki is using in the Plugins tab under the sidebar tab More. This is also how I grabbed things piecemeal from Mehregan.)

One caveat on Command Palette: it seems to have been abandoned by its original maintainer, though there’ve been some more recent (uncommitted) additions on GitHub. It’s also mostly Javascript, which makes it a little tricky to edit if, like me, you don’t know JS. If you’d like easier editing access to the filters it uses, I posted a package with the changes you’ll need here.

#9

Thank you, I’m trying to find now how to install Mehregan since it contains all of those plugins.

#10

Forgot to mention that $:/plugins/hoelzro/full-text-search is pretty awesome too.

#11

What about the theory of note taking? Some easy to follow rules, naming conventions, etc?

#12

Suggestions relating to the original topic and note taking abound, different approaches are used in different plugins and editions and many implement methods publicly known in other solutions. Internet searches including “tiddlywiki” will get you a long way on these, to help you find and curate solutions that look like the way you want things to work.

  • I point this out because any answers you get here will only be a small subset of possible solutions.

A point I want to make is with tiddlywiki you can install or retrofit methods just as you need them, that is your solutions evolve, sometimes you may need to refactor something. A key approach that helps is making sure your methods and code are distinguishable from your data so you can export or transfer either to a fresh wiki for update or proof of concept.

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