When Your WikiText Does Not Work, What Do you Do First?

Or quickly ask in Talk?

EDITED:

Say Sh-t, and read through it again, a few times :nerd_face:

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I attempt problem-solving in this order.

  1. I search in my TW notes that I maintain using TW
  2. I search in Talk TW
  3. I search in Brave Search
  4. I fallback to Google search
  5. I cursorily go through @Mohammad scripts TW
  6. I post my question in Talk TW

I do not visit TW Google Group anymore. I only visit them when they appear in search results or my notes have links to them.

There are some well-maintained TWs that have tutorials or guides, like the tobibeer filter guide, but they have rarely helped me solve my issue. TW search is designed to return results after matching words from the search query to the tiddler contents. It works great if you know the correct terms. But if you don’t, then good luck finding the relevant tiddlers. This is why TW guides offer little utility when stuck in a corner.

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I think that’s related to: Can we make standard search a little smarter?

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I think this talk forum has a high rank in google search, so my first attempt is google it, and then I may click to this forum or the googlegroup.

And my last resort is adding <$log /> widget.

Also there are helpful guides in many people’s wiki, sadly they don’t appear in the google result frequently.

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Oh! Great. Thank you so much. I had no idea. If possible, please share a few examples of using a log widget for debugging.

TW is poison for SEO. TW is a single file application that takes a noticeable time to load. SEO penalizes you if your site is slow to load. On top of it, web spiders are bad at processing JS. TWs score may improve now that data is stored in JSON format. But still.

The ideal solution is to host TWs as static websites on the web. Static website for bots and TW for the users who know it. Every page on the static website can have a banner, “see interactive TW on example.com/tw”.

But that would mean adding one more responsibility to the good samaritan who has already spent hours creating and compiling a guide. :confused:

Have you seen the static site? For example:

https://tiddlywiki.com/static/WikiText

Nothing interactive works, but all the links function well. A feature I just realized I would appreciate would be if the top link would send you to the page you’re viewing statically, here to

https://tiddlywiki.com/#WikiText

This is an option for your own site, if you run in Node. I’m not using it yet for a large project I’m building, but I may get there.

Good time for a cup of tea.

I did this too. Generate a static site just for search but links open the full wiki.

But I am always hoping there can be a normal tw page with lazy loading, so it can be also dynamic and small…

For log widget, I recently copy the wikitext from tw core’s “tag input” to my calendar plugin

omg that was too complicated, so I add it inside the button widget:

const textMacros = `
\\define tag-styles()
background-color:$(backgroundColor)$;
fill:$(foregroundColor)$;
color:$(foregroundColor)$;
\\end
\\define tag-body-inner(colour,fallbackTarget,colourA,colourB,icon)
\\whitespace trim
<$vars foregroundColor=<<contrastcolour target:"""$colour$""" fallbackTarget:"""$fallbackTarget$""" colourA:"""$colourA$""" colourB:"""$colourB$""">> backgroundColor="""$colour$""">
  <$button class="tc-tag-label" style=<<tag-styles>>>

    <$log />  

    <$macrocall $name="tag-tree-button-action" tiddlerName=<<currentTiddler>>/>
    <$transclude tiddler="""$icon$"""/>
    <$transclude field="caption">
      <$view field="title"/>
    </$transclude>
  </$button>
</$vars>
\\end
`;

and see the browser console, check the variable and found it is empty string, so there are something wrong in the vars widget, and I fixed it.

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Perhaps we could introduce a “library of terms” where if one of the terms is in the search string, it uses the other terms in the search as well, basically also search for named synonyms.

  • Interestingly the subsequent number of results often indicates which of the synonyms is the the one in use in the wiki.