The status of the new links page?

The old links page had some cosmetic problems, but you could find things. The new links page only offers the sidebar search. When you search for items, the results only show you the submission author and an id number. There is no way to distinguish between dozens or even hundreds of submissions. Hopefully this is a very temporary condition?

Hi @Mark_S the current search is indeed very basic because so far I’ve only done the minimum to get things working. Ironically, the search feature in the old static presentation was actually broken in some situations which was one of the motivations for switching to a TW presentation.

But one of the advantages of making the links aggregator be an ordinary TiddlyWiki is that it should be easier for others to contribute - if anyone wants to help work on it I’d be very grateful.

Any chance of changing the link in the blue welcome box above (“Welcome to the TiddlyWiki 5 Discourse discussion group for end users”) to the new links address https://links.tiddlywiki.org/ ?

The .com address doesn’t redirect anymore (for me anyway).

What about holding a filter challenge? Forum users can suggest search filters that refine links search results in various useful ways?

Just an idea, best wishes.

The link in the “Welcome box” has now been updated to https://links.tiddlywiki.org

enjoy,
-e

Thank you Eric.

Here’s an entry to the ‘Useful Links Search Filters’ challenge. Results display needs some work but it should find any links created in April 2022 containing ‘memo’ in the text. (Advanced search)

[!is[system]regexp:created[^202204]regexp:text[(?i)memo]]

I know there are better suggestions out there. Offer them here. Let’s own that Links Aggregator!

So this is what I’m thinking of. Add a search tab that uses the sidebar search. Keep the results sparse by eliminating the title, contributor, contribution date, and topics info. Also use dynaview/dynanotate in snippet mode to minimise information overload:

Looks good @Mark_S .

Could the snippet be the first line of the text description? It often contains the ‘name’ of the resource.

Is it necessary to display the full url? Can only the existing buttons be used for the link? Minimal!

Can the existing buttons be reduced to just one for the direct link to the resource? Maybe the link to the reference tiddler link could be incorporated into the text snippet, or removed completely.

The ‘count’ of repeat contributions is useful info imo, working as a ‘like’ indicator.

Minimal list is the way to go imo, ideally with a visually appealing theme. Links Aggregator might be a showcase for Tiddlywiki.

Looking forward to hearing other people’s opinions.

Dynannotate doesn’t give me the ability to set the start of the text. But what I can do is use the first 30 characters of the description as the title (the actual titles are just id strings) and use that instead of the raw url. Next to it, as you can see, is the count:

To my eye it looks much better already , nice one @Mark_S ! Minimal is much easier to scan. Thanks for taking the time to put a template together, it makes discussion much easier.

I think of the Links Aggregator as being essentially a search engine devoted to tiddlywiki so imagine it looking like google or duckduckgo. I’d get rid of everything on the landing page except the search input and then have a minimalist approach to the results, so all the other stuff on the landing page should be hidden imo. Others here will have different ideas I’m sure! Bring it on, you Links Aggregator lovers.

I’d remove the boundary boxes and, if the text snippet title is a link to the actual resource (which is probably what most would expect), then are the 2 trailing buttons needed at all? Would anyone really want to download a result?

This is all just feedback - I’m extremely grateful to the contributors to Links, it is going to be great. Like everything else in tiddlywikiland the possibilities are endless. I wish the process of contributing was a little easier but that’s another topic!

Thanks @Mark_S your changes are now live at https://links.tiddlywiki.org/ It was a great idea to use Dynannotate for the search results.

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Nice one @Mark_S - Much more useable!

Hi @Mark_S @jeremyruston

Links Aggregator is looking much better already, thanks! If you’re still taking suggestions for future improvements here are a few, hopefully other users will chime in with more:

  • advanced search doesn’t produce any output in the results.

  • is it possible to put the search bar inside the ‘search tab’ above results? (It’s a long scroll on mobile up and down between ‘sidebar search’ and the results.

  • make the search tab the default open.

  • is it possible to put all the ‘welcome/how to contribute’ text in a tab ‘About’?

  • remove the ‘Links’ tab - the titles are meaningless.

  • remove the contributors tab - move the list to the About tab

  • rethink the topics tag display - currently at 433 topics, which is pretty difficult to make sense of

Love to hear what other users think, the Links Aggregator is potentially such a useful resource and, as it is now tiddlywiki driven, is a showcase as well. https://links.tiddlywiki.org/

If you notice, typing into the advanced search doesn’t produce results over in the sidebar. There’s sort of a one-way relationship.

I’m looking into this. I would use a simplified (not keyboard driven) input.

These are simple changes - it would depend what @jeremyruston thinks.

My idea is to have a JSON dictionary that will consolidate the entries. Remember that all the current tags come from multiple users. Getting everyone to use the same tags could take years. Easier to make a dictionary that is periodically updated to clean-up mis-matched tags.

Also, maybe not show the tags that are only used once – they are basically just search terms at this point.

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New links page.

With all due respect to those who have contributed to this resource, I do have to ask do we really think this is a reasonable solution? I want to play devils advocate, but in fact I have tried to use this resource a few times and it really grates, I feel more like the devil himself than merely his advocate,

I have decided to withhold my criticisms’ any further, until I calm down.

I can see value in a totally different interface design and possibly it even deserves a total rewrite.

Does anyone else feel the same and how do I start the change that is needed?

Had that being my second experience of tiddlywiki resources, I doubt I would have become the fan I am today.

@TW_Tones I’d expect better from you than this message.

Just to be clear, I don’t think your remarks here do show the respect that you intend. Specifically, why raise this at all if you have decided to withhold your criticism?

You’ve then gone on to make a number of vague criticisms: questioning whether it is a “reasonable solution”, stating that the site “really grates”. That really is not constructive criticism.

I understand from your comments that you were angry. I’d always advise people not to post when they are angry because of the risk of inadvertently offending people.

This comment is formatted as a quote, which has a very specific meaning here: that you are quoting the writing of someone else. I think here you are using it as a typographic effect to emphasise your own writing, which makes your meaning much less clear.

Finally, https://links.tiddlywiki.org/ is of course an ordinary TiddlyWiki and so it is easy for you to contribute improvements, or to build your own version that reuses the same data.

I am sorry you feel the way you do Jeremy, you can expect better and will get better but I think you are over reacting. These are the worst of my criticism’s;

  • is it a reasonable solution?
  • it really grates!

My post was relatively brief and somewhat contained, I was not so much “angry” but “dismayed”. I think perhaps you read “angry” because I said; “until I calm down”. It is possible to calm down from a “dismayed state” as well.

I also did not want to prejudice peoples answers, I just wanted them to stop, look, think and consider that at least one person is speaking out about it. This is intentionally vague.

  • To be honest I expected someone to return saying what you see now is just a work in progress.

Now on the “Real content” of my post I can now proceed to critically break down this sites failings, but, Discourse is a continuing discussion however I have not yet had anyone answer;

To give some idea as to my criticism’s go to the site and try and use search say for information on a “form” withing tiddlywiki; This is what I see;

A short list;

  • Not a centred layout for large screens, wasted space
  • Most search results are useless or unreadable eg; Link from abesamma: 77cddb8bbae52496aced
    • Open that tiddler and the search term “form” is not really evident, use browser search and see the unsatisfactory result below.

  • Have a look at the items in the “Latest” tab, or as above viewing a link tiddler;
    • The user as tiddler and display title - does not help finding content
    • The URI is displayed “in full”, of little use and hard to scan
    • The subtitle is when the link was modified/added, and perhaps not important enough to include.
    • The subjects are displayed as “false tag pills” and are actually links;
      • You can’t click to see the other items so tagged
    • The body text is really the only thing someone looking for a link / solution can use to read about and understand what it is,
      • The text is unstructured information
      • It appears to be un-wikified/unformatted
      • The text is almost the smallest content on the page.

That is true but actually that should not be the key feature of a community resource, it should work well as is.

  • Unfortunately as per my despair it needs a major work over;

Let me restate and re-emphasise;

OK, So I started work seeing if I can reform this.

I have already found some great potential improvement’s however there is one fundamental problem. The ugly tiddler titles do not have a caption or short name available to replace them.

Now looking at the “link from” tiddlers there are over 1,000 so obtaining the short meaningful names (which do not appear to exist) and then converting these will be somewhat labour intensive. I believe there is no doubt this needs to be done.

Before I do this work I will find a way to;

  • Save the existing titles to the source-tiddler field (easy) but this may not be necessary as the title in manufactured from origin & url-hash
  • Extract content from each link tiddler with an editor toolbar button to rename the tiddler (Tricky)

If you have any way to obtain and ultimately maintain this short name from existing content please tell me.

If I do this I will need a mechanism to integrate it with the link submission process, and ideally have any links submitted in future come with their own “short name”, perhaps the title of the original tiddler from their source? Perhaps a caption field?

  • I would appreciate someone with the technical knowledge of this to collaborate if possible.

Without collaboration I will maintain an independent version of the links site and try and determine a method to extract and convert new links as they are added.

BTW, the search tab uses the first few words as the title, and then provides context.

Mark but context do you mean Topic?

This is what I see in SideBar search

Snag_84fd5a5