The power of Title. An experiment & a Q?

[TiddlyTitch]

@pmario

There are no standard fields,

I did a test via JSON import of 570+ Tiddlers that had only Title fields … example (great for the use case which doesn’t need Text fields) …

[{"title":"with South Park because he hates Trump, and he's trying to expose through humor the hypocrisy and the meanness and the viciousness."},
{"title":"Trump does not find it funny."},
{"title":"Trust me, he hates it."},
{"title":"I'm Joanna Coles."},
{"title":"This is the Daily Beast podcast."},
{"title":"Who better to have on this week than Anthony Scaramucci
... etc

 [edited for readability]

Very interesting were the stats on that import (timestamps off) …

0.03 Mb in 576 tiddler titles

TW in default is Title centric so everything worked without additional fields.

Q: What I’m wondering if whether IN TW you can create new Tiddlers that are ONLY Titles? (i.e no body text, no tags, no timestamps, just a title field)

Just wondering
TT

[Springer]

Of course you can do this… not without considerable tinkering though.

The easiest step is to turn timestamps off, so your newly created tiddlers don’t get creation and modification fields.

You’d have to tweak the core, though, so that the creator and modifier field (tracking username as shown in control panel) would not be set.

If you’re doing this to shave time off of the import process, or for any other efficiency-related motivation, I’m skeptical that it’s worth the tradeoff in terms of real information lost (especially modification timestamp, which helps tremendously with troubleshooting).

On the other hand, you can also use a tool like the Commander plugin to strip these standard fields from a batch of tiddlers. I’ve occasionally done something like that, to streamline some bundle of tiddlers whose origins really don’t need tracking.

[etardiff]

@Springer

Of course you can do this… not without considerable tinkering though.

I’m going to push back on this just a bit… if you’re willing to use a custom interface rather than the standard tiddler editor, you can do this with a single tiddler and no core tinkering. And I’d hazard that if you’re creating title-only tiddlers (why? I can’t think of any reasons that wouldn’t be better served by a data tiddler, but perhaps you’ve got a plan) you probably don’t need the full editor experience anyway.

In any case, here’s a demo: Title-only tiddler generator.tid (936 Bytes) I forgot to include the how-to (such as it is) in the tiddler itself, but it’s intended to accept one tiddler title per line (no brackets needed).

And the raw code:

\define title-filter() [<currentTiddler>get[temp]splitregexp[\n]]
\procedure create()
<$list filter=<<title-filter>>>
<$action-createtiddler $basetitle={{!!title}}>
<$action-deletefield $tiddler=<<createTiddler-title>> $timestamp="no" created modified />
</$action-createtiddler>
</$list>
\end

\procedure delete() <$action-deletetiddler $filter=<<title-filter>> />
\procedure reset() <$action-deletefield temp />

<$edit-text field=temp tag=textarea class="tc-max-width" />
<$button actions=<<create>>>Create as title-only tiddlers</$button>
<$button actions=<<delete>>>Delete the above tiddlers</$button>
<$button actions=<<reset>>>Reset list</$button>

<$list filter=<<title-filter>>>

<$link />
<$list filter="[<currentTiddler>fields[]] -title" variable=field>

* <<field>>
</$list>

</$list>

EDIT: It wasn’t an issue in my testing on TW-com, but if you’ve filled in a username in your personal wiki, you’ll want to add creator modifier to the list of fields to be deleted — so it should read:

<$action-deletefield $tiddler=<<createTiddler-title>> $timestamp="no" creator modifier created modified />

[TiddlyTitch]

@Springer

you can do this… not without considerable tinkering though

Eek!

@Springer

You’d have to tweak the core, though, so that the creator and modifier field (tracking username as shown in control panel) would not be set.

Q: If I keep the username empty would that prevent creation of that field?

@Springer

If you’re doing this to shave time off of the import process, or for any other efficiency-related motivation, I’m sceptical that it’s worth the tradeoff in terms of real information lost

Ah. The particular data needs no tracking at all.
And my motivation is to reduce the number of not needed bytes, not time.

FWIW, the final aim is I want to do Burroughs style cut-ups in TW with thousands of titles.
This is a step towards that, I hope.

Thanks for your comments. I will look at @Mohammad’s Commander to see if it can help.
TT

[Scott_Sauyet]

@Springer

If you’re doing this to shave time off of the import process, or for any other efficiency-related motivation, I’m skeptical that it’s worth the tradeoff in terms of real information lost (especially modification timestamp, which helps tremendously with troubleshooting).

I’ve done a lot of tiddler-generation from external sources. For no obvious reason, I used to include created and modified timestamps and ensured that they were generated in an appropriate order. It took @pmario pointing out that I was simply wasting space for no reason for me to stop this behavior.

@pmario

I think, you could reduce the size by 2MB if you remove the created and modified fields. They do not really have any value.

Over a lot of tiddlers, these things do add up.

[TiddlyTitch]

@etardiff

you probably don’t need the full editor experience anyway.

Right. For the purpose the editor is totally unnecessary.

@etardiff

here’s a demo: Title-only tiddler generator.tid (936 Bytes) … it’s intended to accept one tiddler title per line

[TT edited]

Thank you for the tool! Very much!

I tested it. It did a test job no problem with very long titles …

TT

[TW_Tones]

is this not an ideal case for missing tiddlers?, importing the titles then making a small process to format them as titles and join them with a space placing them in a tiddler, eg “short phrases”?

• then use them as missing tiddlers
• delete the imported titles
• use [[short phrases]links[]] to list or search.

this way the short phrases tiddler stores the metadata for all the titles imported, it’s created modified details, tags etc…

the link editor toolbar button could be modified to include missing tiddler titles so you can insert any of these titles in your tiddler with ctrl-L

coincidentally if they were imported as tiddlers they would be my recently discussed “nascent tiddlers”.