What advice or information would you have given your past self?

#1

Something I see a lot with ‘If I could go back and relearn’ type YouTube videos, is suggestions the person will make for beginners aimed more towards advice they felt they could have benefitted from when starting out.

I’d like to hear what other users would have liked to know starting out, maybe some advice for things you ran into along the way, or specific ideologies you would recommend earlier on.

Personally, I would have told myself to not rely on only macros, and instead learn the widgets themselves first and then utilize them afterwords (thank you @Mohammad), and to read through the TW website, especially the tiddlers tagged Concepts. (Though- I am still learning, so my past self isn’t all that far away haha)

Anybody else have tips for their past selves?

#2

I would have told myself,

  • Don’t fret about about the need for extras lines in wiki text eg; between a paragraph and a bullet point, a list widget and its content etc… They serve a purpose and there are plenty of work arounds.
  • I second the “not rely on macros”, eg; too much time wasted with list-links rather than learning the $list widget which is after all key functionality.
  • I wish I transitioned from TW Classic, to TW5 sooner, but not too soon.
  • I wish I searched more for existing solutions, rather than always build my own.

I will try and think of more from that ancient period.

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#3

Niched wikis

My first advice to my past self is to split your wiki into smaller wikis from the start.

I have been using TW for more than five years now. Previously, I would bundle everything piece of information and tidbit into a single wiki. It was quick. I did not face any performance issues.

I recently started to split my wiki, and I realized that small, niched, and focused wikis are much better. I can organize my notes much better if they are centred around a specific niche.

Schema

The second piece of advice is to design a schema for your notes. @TW_Tones mentioned schema in a post, which changed my approach towards TiddlyWiki.

For example, I moved my notes on command line tools and snippets to a new wiki. I realized I could organize these notes better if I tagged them with the commands used in the snippet, like grep, find, make etc.

In another wiki, which has course content, I could use fields to organize tiddlers in the order they should be taught.

Another question for schema design is to think about organizing images and other external resources.

Transclusions

The final advice, for now, is to use transclusions. I was afraid of using transclusions because we did not have Relink plugin. I was worried that updating all transclusions after renaming a tiddler would be a chore. Relink plugin solved this issue for me. But, even without it, transclusion is very useful.

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#4

that’s the first time I’ve seen the word schema, I wish I had known sooner haha

Hm, I might need to move more towards that.
I always try to modify or create my own version of things and while more personalized, makes it a bit of a hassle to share my own creations.
At the very least though, it has taught me to follow the designs already in place for TW so others know where stuff is :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

#5

Let me to disagree. Macros and templates are tools to encapsulate structure and skin and prevent redundant wikitext all around Wiki.

Having background in modular programming, all kookma plugins were developed with this approach in mind. I believe kookma plugins are more hackable, and maintainable as they are modular.

Modular programming is a software design technique that emphasizes separating the functionality of a program into independent, interchangeable modules , such that each contains everything necessary to execute only one aspect of the desired functionality.

When you upgrade a macro or fix bugs, the new feature automatically propagates to all places you have used that macro as far as the header is the same.

So with all due respects to above opinions, I recommend macros and templates. There are opinions for using template instead of macro (mostly because of performance), but for my use case (small to medium scale) I prefer macros!

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#6

oh I totally agree, macros (and templates) are fantastic! but I believe I miscommunicated my point.

I’m not against the use of them, not at all- I love using macros! but as a beginner, I was relying on them without knowing the widgets they were calling to, and as a result I did not know how to use widgets or macros past one or two specific use-cases from what I saw in various tiddlers.

The sheer modularity of macros is a fantastic thing for backwards compatibility and modifications for the TW you are working on.

I would still recommend using and creating macros and templates- but only after learning how they work, which is what I had not done until months and months into learning TW functions.

#7

Great recommendation! Yes absolutely correct!

After getting opinions through this thread you may have some recommendations: How to learn TiddlyWiki? :wink:

#8

Take the time to go through the documentation about filter syntax from beginning to end.

When I finally did it, filters went from being this obscure and inscrutable syntax with seemingly many exceptions to a very logical and internally consistent syntax that I have since never struggled with again.

As a newcomer to TW5 I tried to just lookup the operator I might need etc without first understanding the basic syntax and that was quite a frustrating experience.

This is approximately the order I would recommend.

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