TiddlyWiki is very powerful but gives too much freedom to new users. I lost myself: A story and an idea

#31

These are interesting reflections. I believe we could start opening a collective project.

Since what we are trying to build is a simple edition, in my opinion it shouldn’t be too complicated (besides, I’m an incurable optimist)
Now I’m talking about “editions” because in my opinion it’s the first step to take: Let’s start with an organic product first, which is also the easiest thing to do. then we will think, if necessary, about making it more “grainy” and flexible. I would say first let’s try to see what direction it would take

Yes, I don’t know how easy it will be, but I’m honestly quite optimistic. What is certain is that we need to build something that encourages customization, but still gives a foundation to build on.

Perhaps rather than “encourage” I should say “allows” customization. I don’t know how to “encourage” custiomization or if encouraging it is the right thing to do. But giving the tools to the user to make it his own is the best thing we can do.

  • In this regard, I share my thoughts on something:

    I have already mentioned that I learned to use TiddlyWiki by deconstructing other users’ solutions, that link to tabs was very useful to me, etc.

    I would encourage, wherever possible, building plugins for a “starter” edition with code readability in mind.
    Sometimes I imagine it is necessary, especially for more ambitious plugins, to use many transclusions and many different tiddlers, but for the user who wants to learn, reading codes that are too branched out is very difficult, and learning opportunities are lost.

    I say this as a complete inexperienced person, it may be a bad habit to try to give priority to the readability of the code. I do not know. So forgive me if I’m wrong. But I wanted to say it, because if it is possible, it can help inexperienced users a lot. (Maybe this should be considered for the most linear and simple functions, for more complicated things, the priorities are different)

I don’t know how we could organize ourselves, I don’t even know the possibilities of this site, but I would say to focus on building a couple of very simple “starter editions” of different categories.

Maybe a “recipe starter edition” and a “note-taking starter edition”. (Idk, just an example)

We could create two topics and two projects: In the topic we collect which functionality we believe could be the best for the purpose of the edition, perhaps also using polls. Maybe we can also share some of our own solutions and discuss whether they can find a place in a “starter edition”.
Then we could start compiling them and we see where these projects take us.
In short, test the waters

#32

Yes, that seems like a good idea to me :+1:t2:

#33

To resolve this issue we could ask people what the first thing is they want to change, or customise. Some will want themes and fonts, other would want dark mode, I like a contents tab, and more button active on the Page Controls, Yes I want relink most of the time, my not until my wiki demands it.

  • This would help build an initial list for a not empty edition.
#34

@snapsam:

As per our discussion, https://tiddlytools.com/#TiddlyTools%2FSearch%2FFilters has been updated so that the “Filter Maker” visibility is now stored in

  • $:/state/TiddlyTools/Filters/filtermaker (a persistent state tiddler, retained when the file is saved)

instead of

  • $:/state/popup/TiddlyTools/Filters/filtermaker (a transient state tiddler, discarded when the file is saved).

Note that while $:/state/... tiddlers (but NOT $:/state/popup/... tiddlers) are retained when saving, changes to those tiddlers do not automatically cause the current session to become “dirty” (see $:/config/SaverFilter) and will not result in an “unsaved changes” warning when exiting. Thus, if you haven’t made any other changes that need to be saved on exit, you will need to manually invoke the “save changes” button to preserve the current visibility state of the “Filter Maker” before exiting.

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#35

This is why I suggested that rather than try to collect one edition of the most useful tools, we should have many, covering multiple types of TW, each one with its own set of plugins and bespoke tools. I think trying to create a useful advanced starter edition is likely to fail because of the inherent complexity. Smaller ones can highlight both the uses of TW and the power of specific tools.

That’s a great idea! This could be a much simpler way to manage what I suggested above. I don’t know how far innerwiki implementations scale; if they can hold twenty or thirty subwikis, this could be an amazing tool!

(BTW, there is a typo on the home page, which means that “Near Empty TiddlyWiki Edition” leads to a missing tiddler.

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#36

My dayjob does involve putting pen to paper, and fingers to keys.

I have even actually earned a few royalty checks in my life. Distributed over the course of about ten years, it has added up to about enough for half a month’s worth of mortgage. So, I don’t know if you could call it “lucrative”. :rofl:

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#37

Ha! Me, too! I think it amounts to a little more than that, but I won’t be quitting my day-job any time soon. :cry:

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#38

I think it would be interesting to fold a little more of the DesignWriteStudio material into the community editions. This is part of Steve Schneider’s course where he uses TiddlyWiki to teach concepts about hypertext. I think of the barriers to making effective use of TiddlyWiki is understanding some key “tiddler philosophy” which long time users have internalized, but have profound implications for understanding how to use TiddlyWiki.

  1. The philosophy of tiddlers

The philosophy of tiddlers is that we maximise the possibilities for re-use by slicing information up into the smallest semantically meaningful units with rich modelling of relationships between them. Then we use aggregation and composition to weave the fragments together to present narrative stories. - Source

  1. Every tiddler is a tag is a tiddler. (TagglyTagging)

  2. A link to a tiddler is a form of tagging. (my own thought)

It is worth also to create a diagram or mind map or even an outline from time to time to help see the structure of your TIddlyWiki from a different perspective.

#39

:+1:t2:

Yes, I was then convinced of the same thing too. Multiple editions/solutions for different needs

  • What do you say?

Shall I create a new topic where anyone from the community who wants can start exploring what the best solutions could be for a particular use of TiddlyWiki?

I would start with something common like “note-taking” or “journaling”. Then we’ll see where this little initial project takes us

Please tell me what you think or what the best way to handle this would be

#40

Maybe we could start with a general thread to:

  • Vote to see which uses (e.g. note taking, task management, cookbook) are most popular and to discover some niche uses that we might not be aware of.
  • Discuss the problems of creating, curating, and presenting these “editions”. Maybe a separate thread to discuss the technical backend would be good. Some of this has already been discussed above.

And now for something completely different.

We have the “Showcase” category here on forum to share real life examples, but this is not easily discoverable from main site. This is not as helpful to newcomers as the discussed editions, but at least we already have a lot of content for that.

There is the Examples tiddler on main site (also presented as a tab in Community, which is displayed in the river by default), which contains a short list of examples, not updated since a long time, and imo rather exotic examples.

Link to forum Showcase category from the Examples on the main site would be the simplest thing to do for now.
In the long run, cataloguing of all showcase examples in links.tiddlywiki.org would be ideal (there’s not so many of them after all, and I see some are catalogued already).
And the last thing, that requires work, but not more than what is discussed here. I think even after the entries from Community tiddler will be removed form the homepage (after moving all to links), it would be nice for newcomers if a curated short selection of plugins, editions, and examples would be presented on homepage.

#41

Yes. I think the first step is to find important uses.

For instance, my periodic table wiki might do well in a look-what-you-can-do showcase, but would have no place in a list of editions-you-might-build-upon.

What I don’t know how to do here is to collect the data somewhat rigorously. Does Discourse have any polling/voting tools? I guess that’s for a later step, after an initial group discussion. But I think we will eventually need that as a way to separate the consensus from the loudest voices.

Yes, but maybe later? Let’s figure out what before worrying about how. We might end up with very different designs of we’re trying to present three editions than if we expect to handle thirty.

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#42

Yes

image

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#43

I created a new topic.
In this topic I invite a discussion about which editions are the most important and about how it would be best to proceed. I believe we can do both in one.

But anyway, if there’s something I should change, tell me (including the topic’s tags: I put “community projects” and “landing page”, but I don’t know if they’re right)

#44

While I love the TiddlyWiki in vanilla form, but for different use cases I have to install different plugins.

As other explained above, there are too many different applications, and for all of them TW is enough flexible to conform with!

As @TW_Tones explained, editions can help newcomers to get onboard more smoothly! So, may be we need to more focus on creating polished well configured editions.

I myself use TW for research and there are three editions for this. I use Mehregan which has the Zettelkasten features for scientific note-taking and I am very happy with that.

#45

I’m hoping that Tiddlyhost can be a useful place for new TiddlyWiki users to find “editions”.

At the moment it is uncurated - any Tiddlyhost user can put whatever they like there - but I could imagine a carefully curated list of editions, where the editions are carefully chosen by the community, and there’s some kind of plan to keep them updated and working as new versions of TiddlyWiki are released.

Wdyt?

Ps, this thread made me think of Provide a "download" option as well as "clone" when showing templates in the explore tab · Issue #323 · simonbaird/tiddlyhost · GitHub which would make that list more useful for people not already using Tiddlyhost.

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#46

Fantastic idea! There can be a non-curated public library of whatever folks want to share, but also some kind of overview with helpful comments…

Maybe even a master “TW editions” wiki with tagging, other metadata, plus iframes to preview stuff?

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#47

No matter which edition you use, you need to spend time understanding it before you can find the workflow that suits you. Not just tiddlywiki, many things are like thisComplex or simple is relative. If you want to understand every function, then it is complex. If you just Only a few features are required so it’s simple for you, time will tell,

#48

This is how I wish Tiddlyhost worked right now, but would it be possible to extend it so that it does so for new accounts:

https://username.tiddlyhost.com/wikiname/

?

I would love to claim, say, the “community” username for this effort, and then to have

https://community.tiddlyhost.com/notetaking/
https://community.tiddlyhost.com/authornotes/
https://community.tiddlyhost.com/recipes/

etc.

Would this be a large change? Would it be something a competent programmer be to the code-base might be able to take on?

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#49

Yeah, this would be a big change. There’s a lot of code that assumes one domain name per site. I guess it’s doable, but I’m not sure I like the idea. I can see that it makes the naming tidier, but the additional complexity might not be worth it overall.

We could still provide a list of editions under a single username via the hub, e.g. Tiddlyhost . Also a tag could be used if different users maintain different editions.

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#50

I think the tiddlyhost hub and listing methods go a long way. Especialy since they can be used as templates. Just needs a little more promotion.