Important Message from Eric
Eric Shulman
Most of you know me as the author of TiddlyTools.com ("Small Tools for
Big Ideas"), where I publish and actively maintain hundreds of
original TiddlyWiki addons (plugins, scripts, themes, etc.) that I
have written. You also know me as the moderator and a "key
contributor" to the TiddlyWiki GoogleGroups, where I often post
detailed instructions, explanations and solutions in response to
questions posed by people who are using TiddlyWiki in many different
aspects of their daily lives. Some of you may also know that,
professionally, I earn my living as an independent consultant,
specializing in User Experience Design and Information Architecture,
providing software design and development services to companies and
individuals in Silicon Valley and the surrounding San Francisco Bay
Area, as well as remotely over the net.
What most of you don't know is that, since 2006, I have been providing
ongoing TiddlyWiki consulting services to the UnaMesa Association --
the non-profit organization that holds the copyright on the TiddlyWiki
source. In addition to earning a modest but steady income (enough to
cover my basic living expenses) from working directly on UnaMesa-
sponsored TiddlyWiki projects, the primary effect of their financial
support has been to help promote the overall health and growth of the
worldwide TiddlyWiki community by allowing me to focus most of my time
and effort on creating and publishing new addons and providing
technical assistance to the TiddlyWiki community without the constant
distraction of seeking out new clients/projects.
Unfortunately, since the beginning of 2011, UnaMesa has been facing a
fiscal shortfall that has significantly reduced their financial
support for my TiddlyWiki activities. Although there may still be
some funds budgeted for specific UnaMesa-sponsored projects, funds for
general TiddlyWiki "community support services" have been completely
exhausted and are no longer available. Regardless, despite this loss
of funding, the *need* for these community support services has not
changed. In fact, as TiddlyWiki continues to grow and evolve, it is
being applied to an ever-increasing variety of sophisticated real-
world applications for which technical help and assistance are almost
certain to be even more vital.
From a personal perspective, the problem is simple: in order to
continue providing full-time support to the worldwide TiddlyWiki
community, I must quickly find a way to replace the loss of revenue
from UnaMesa, ideally without the distraction of finding and working
on *non*-TiddlyWiki consulting projects. Of course, TiddlyTools.com
is an open-source effort, so there are no licensing fees for the
addons I have published, and my online assistance has also been
offered free of charge. However, there *is* a "tip jar" form on
TiddlyTools.com (see http://www.TiddlyTools.com/#Donations) that
allows you to easily make voluntary contributions (via PayPal) as a
way of showing your appreciation and support for my continued efforts.
You should consider making one (or more) donations to the tip jar if
you:
* use TiddlyTools plugins, scripts, etc. on a regular basis
* have been helped by my online answers, even if you didn't ask the
question!
* request specific help for your document (and I provide a useful
response)
* request enhancements to plugins to add new features for specific use-
cases
* or, just generally appreciate and want to support my TiddlyWiki work
You should also note that, in addition to rewarding specific efforts,
your donations will help give me time for ongoing general maintenance
of the main TiddlyTools.com document in response to updates in the
TWCore, as well as time to develop and publish new addons and
TiddlyTools QuickStart(tm) documents (pre-configured, task-optimized
mini-applications). The amount and frequency of your donations are
entirely up to you, and should be based on how much benefit you feel
you actually receive as a result of my work. Ask yourself how much
time/effort you've saved, and how much that is truly worth in real
dollars... and then donate an amount that you feel comfortable with.
Even with generous community contributions, I don't realistically
expect that my *entire* monthly budget will always be covered by
voluntary donations from the TiddlyWiki community (though it would be
very nice -- and would bring me great JOY!). So, in addition the
TiddlyTools.com "tip jar", you can also directly **HIRE ME** to
provide professional-quality consulting services for your TiddlyWiki
documents, including analysis and evaluation of the overall document
design, diagnosis and debugging to help locate and fix complex
document errors, general solutions for common problems, and custom
development of new plugins (or enhancements to existing plugins) to
support your specific needs.
My professional services are available on an as-needed basis, or as
ongoing consulting as part of a planned, scheduled project effort.
For tasks under 1 hour, you should make a suitable donation to my tip
jar. For short-term projects or complex diagnostic/debugging
requests, I offer reasonable hourly, daily, and weekly rates. For
larger, long-term projects, a fixed-cost monthly retainer can also be
arranged.
It is my hope that, through a combination of consistent and generous
tip jar donations combined with earnings from private TiddlyWiki
consulting projects, the TiddlyWiki community itself can provide the
funds so I can continue to do the work I love without distractions:
providing full-time technical support and advice to the worldwide
TiddlyWiki community.
So, my friends, it is now up to you... as the holiday season
approaches, please consider giving thanks by making a gift to the
TiddlyTools "tip jar". Whether its just a 'stocking stuffer', or
Santa's entire workshop, your financial support will truly be "the
gift that keeps on giving".
Be Well, Be Happy.
much thanks,
-e
Eric Shulman
TiddlyTools / ELS Design Studios
Måns
I can't be (haven't been) as generous (or consistent for that matter)
as I'd like to be, however I have contributed to the jar today with
$55,40 USD (only my second over the years - I'm afraid...) - and
that's what I can afford on this side of christmas..
Would it be possible/appropriate - to show a statistic of the amount
of contributions and their sizes (anonymous is fine) - to get an
indication if ones contributions matters at all ??
Two indicators - one showing what is needed "to make a difference
overall" (might be a constant..) and another one showing status of
todays/this week - whatever..
I think like this:
I'd like to be able to make consistent contributions (private) of say
$28 USD pr month in 2012 (it's approximately the price of a mobile
subscription in Denmark, and one of my kids will pay for his own phone
subscription next year)
- If I or other aspiring contributors can watch "the pile grow" and
see that a small amount of money is what is needed to create a balance
at the end of a month - that indication might inspire
"privateers" (like myself) - to join the party - add to the pile :-)
I sincerely hope this community is big enough - that people will be
able to make a difference with small contributions in this time of
economical crisis, which seems to affect small companies, private
economies, non-profit organizations first....
Let's show that we care about this community and all things "Open" and
help ourselves continue FREE labor on a FREE(open source) product.
Thanks for giving us the oppertunity to "pay back" and keep a focused
moderator - and not giving up!!
Just my 2 cents -
Cheers Måns Mårtensson
Yoann Babel
It is slowly dying.
Why ?
Because there is no [ANN] list for plugins, or some recognized central
area where to find them, and for more than 2 years, we have the
feeling that nothing happens in the TW sphere ...
I tryied a long time ago to warn about that.
Maybe also because TW5 is not coming out, and people look for freash
new tech elsewhere.
Sorry to say that because I'm a huge fan of TW.
Måns
> It is slowly dying.
> Why ?
> Because there is no [ANN] list for plugins, or some recognized central
> area where to find them, and for more than 2 years, we have the
> feeling that nothing happens in the TW sphere ...
> new tech elsewhere.
two years?
If that's not freash new tech - please tell what is??
Please checkout http://tiddlyspace.com - and enjoy all the great (and
new) contributions: plugins, themes, docs etc...
I've only known the TW-community since 2009 - and I've had fun -
getting support and new things to play with (almost) on a daily
basis.
I do *not* recognize or understand your point of view - maybe because
I'm also active in several other relatively popular open source
projects (linux distributions and groups) none of them presenting the
users with (less than) half as much activity from:
- developpers
- aspiring programmers
- users
- moderator
I think this group (and TiddlyWeb) has presented the most responsive
community of programmers and users I've ever come across anywhere
else... (since 2009)
> Sorry to say that because I'm a huge fan of TW.
(16 April 2009?) please have a look at Jon's mindmapplugin at
tiddlyspace: http://mindmaps.tiddlyspace.com/tiddlers.wiki
or Tobias' playground with the hypergraphplugin: http://hype.tiddlyspace.com/
You might get som inspiration to get on with your own (btw) excellent
project :-)
Both are easily sharable via inclusion on tiddlyspace .... thereby
allowing users to interact with the code instantly....
I think TiddlyWiki via TiddlySpace has opened up to a broader public
of "ordinary" web-users, who has little or no knowledge of html or
javascript whatsoever -
Maybe TiddlySpace is the "Noah's Arch" for TiddlyWiki (because of the
newly introduced security plans in browsers) providing everything -
and even much more usercontrol than any other collaborative wiki
feature and at the same time it still can be downloaded and used as a
single file...
TiddlyWiki and TiddlySpace are great open source projects - and I
think we owe it to the devellopers, as well as to ourselves (and new
users coming because of TiddlySpace), to try to support an individual,
like Eric, the moderator of this group (I hope for years to come) if
we can....
I hope Eric will get so much time he will eventually be able to
participate in the devellopment of TiddlySpace - or (as a minimum) get
all of his great plugins syncronized to the TiddlySpace server, so we
can pick them from there.
See the idea? If you have published your plugin on TiddlySpace - your
upgrades will get into all spaces which have included it - unless
ofcourse you have changed it - saved it to your own space...
Now a plugin is like a ShadowTiddler - If you don't like the changes
you've made yourself - just delete it - and you'll get the programmers
latest upgrade - INSTANTLY!!!
I think I can say I *LOVE* TiddlySpace - and I'm sure I would love it
even more if Eric maintained his plugins on TiddlySpace.....
(Just a hint @Eric - hope you understand why it would be SO great if
your plugins were maintained by yourself on TiddlySpace. - I'm sure it
would ensure that your great Plugins would work with TiddlySpace most
of the time.. - and that TiddlyWeb devellopers would participate in
the usergroup discussions more often... (not that they don't - they
DO, however developing plugins on TiddlySpace seems to imply that you
have to be uptodate with any new coredevellopment -))
Cheers Måns Mårtensson
Måns
Forgot to mention:
http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki/t/c94a58696d5739a5?
Does it answer your question here?:
http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki/browse_thread/thread/c8fa01bf4b450038/16dbf74766c4e891?lnk=raot
Cheers Måns Mårtensson
On 8 Nov., 14:30, Måns <humam...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Yoann
>
> > It is slowly dying.
> > Why ?
> > Because there is no [ANN] list for plugins, or some recognized central
> > area where to find them, and for more than 2 years, we have the
> > feeling that nothing happens in the TW sphere ...
> > Maybe also because TW5 is not coming out, and people look for freash
> > new tech elsewhere.
>
> You haven't noticed what happened with TiddlyWeb/Space during the last
> two years?
> If that's not freash new tech - please tell what is??
Miles Fidelman
> Hi Yoann
>
>> It is slowly dying.
>> Why ?
>> Because there is no [ANN] list for plugins, or some recognized central
>> area where to find them, and for more than 2 years, we have the
>> feeling that nothing happens in the TW sphere ...
>> Maybe also because TW5 is not coming out, and people look for freash
>> new tech elsewhere.
> You haven't noticed what happened with TiddlyWeb/Space during the last
> two years?
> If that's not freash new tech - please tell what is??
> Please checkout http://tiddlyspace.com - and enjoy all the great (and
> new) contributions: plugins, themes, docs etc...
>
Well, I kind of agree with Yoann. We just spent some serious time
evaluating whether to use TiddlyWiki as the basis for an open source
application we're building, and backed away for several reasons:
- no well defined community or governance mechanisms
- really sketchy documentation (nothing serious at the architectural level)
- no clear idea of how it follows standards (or doesn't) - which is
really critical as browsers keep evolving
Re. TiddlyWeb - now it's REALLY hard to decipher what's going on under
the hood.
All in all, it's very frustrating. TW is very capable, obviously has a
lot of time and expertise invested in it over several years - but what
could be a really powerful platform for single-page applications has
really become more of a series of hacks than something more carefully
organized.
It's a shame.
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In<fnord> practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Måns
> several reasons:
> - no well defined community or governance mechanisms
> - really sketchy documentation (nothing serious at the architectural level)
TiddlySpace: http://tiddlywikidev.tiddlyspace.com/
> - no clear idea of how it follows standards (or doesn't) - which is
> really critical as browsers keep evolving
> Re. TiddlyWeb - now it's REALLY hard to decipher what's going on under the hood.
http://docs.tiddlyspace.com
http://tiddlyweb.peermore.com/wiki/
etc etc etc....
> All in all, it's very frustrating. TW is very capable, obviously has a
> lot of time and expertise invested in it over several years - but what
> could be a really powerful platform for single-page applications has
> really become more of a series of hacks than something more carefully
> organized.
If you're a developer I suggest that you search for plugins and plugin
documentation on TiddlySpace, TiddlyTools or on GitHub.
If you are an software entrepeneur PLEASE hire Eric and get the
fastest most efficient response you can think of..... (And we get a
happy moderator...)
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In<fnord> practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
theory there should be some ??
Cheers Måns Mårtensson
Miles Fidelman
> Hi Miles
>
>> several reasons:
>> - no well defined community or governance mechanisms
> ? https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki/about
an email list is not a community and definitely not a governance mechanism
by contrast:
- debian.org
- http://couchdb.apache.org/
- http://drupal.org/community
right now, the most concise collection of info about Tiddly is the
wikipedia page
>
>> - really sketchy documentation (nothing serious at the architectural level)
> One more of Eric's: http://www.tiddlytools.com/insideTW/
>
> TiddlySpace: http://tiddlywikidev.tiddlyspace.com/
that's a start, but it's a far cry from anything that provides an
architectural overview, data architecture, data flow architecture,
control flow architecture -- i.e., how all the pieces fit together
say... like the documentation for jquery
>
>> - no clear idea of how it follows standards (or doesn't) - which is
>> really critical as browsers keep evolving
> http://tiddlywiki.com/#%5B%5BTiddlyWiki%20Browser%20Compatibility%5D%5D
that's an after-the-fact list of problems - not a strategy for staying
ahead of browser compatibility issues
like, say the approach phonegap takes
>> Re. TiddlyWeb - now it's REALLY hard to decipher what's going on under the hood.
> http://tiddlyspace.tiddlyspace.com
> http://docs.tiddlyspace.com
> http://tiddlyweb.peermore.com/wiki/
> etc etc etc....
lots of little pieces - nothing that presents an organized view of how
the pieces fit together
and... lots of tidbits, spread across lots of locations - no indication
of what's current, what's not
>> All in all, it's very frustrating. TW is very capable, obviously has a
>> lot of time and expertise invested in it over several years - but what
>> could be a really powerful platform for single-page applications has
>> really become more of a series of hacks than something more carefully
>> organized.
> TiddlyWiki is hackable - which is why I use it...
> If you're a developer I suggest that you search for plugins and plugin
> documentation on TiddlySpace, TiddlyTools or on GitHub.
> If you are an software entrepeneur PLEASE hire Eric and get the
> fastest most efficient response you can think of..... (And we get a
> happy moderator...)
personally, my suggestion is that Eric, or somebody take a serious look
at developing a business model for TiddlyWiki - it could be a very nice
platform, but not if it's simply a couple of hackers, hacking away when
they can
Jeremy Rustin, or the folks at UnaMesa, or Eric, or somebody needs to
start thinking about what TiddlyWiki wants to be when it grows up - and
how to get there --- they need to start thinking like Ian Murdock, or
Linus, or the folks behind CouchDB....
right now, it's amateur hour
--
wolfgang
somehow they also seem in the wrong place of Eric trying to find a
solution for being of continuing help, and thereby in part addressing
those very issues. Don't think one person could handle all this as one
person alone though. But the alternative isn't that nice either:
leaving without a word, as it so often happens..
I want to say thanks for being so frank about the challenges you're
facing, Eric. And I do hope this still turns someway good for you and
every TiddlyWiki user.
Of course, it does give some weight to the notion already repeatedly
raised that TW would be a dying thing - since it actually has been on
a sort of paid life-support for already that long - which now wont be
available to the former extent:
Really no other plugin repository in it's extent, well written
documentation and unbelievable functionality added - comes even close
to TiddlyTools. So I'm certainly not the minority when I say it was
really your efforts that got me hooked to TW. And I'm one of the many
who uses your add-ons on a regular basis, ..have been greatly helped
by your responses to my specific requests. TiddlyWiki's world would be
very different without, because it makes so many of TW's amazing
possibilities for everyday use available ready-made to java-script
illiterate users. And still will continue to do for a long time, even
if a few of your plugins already have quited their job with the latest
TW versions.
However, beside my own precarious momentary financial situation due to
a variety of reasons (which hopefully will also change again, and I'll
become able to donate some) I, as yourself, don't realistically
believe this could ever cover your ongoing expenses. Though TW
GoogleGroup's many members have been quite busy, practically those who
are active at any given time are only a handful and really seem to
decline further..
Personally always felt very grateful for your upper exceptional
support and responsiveness to plugin feature requests. So I tried to
give back at least some by answering beginners questions as much as I
could. Thought this would create some sort of equilibrium between
giving and taking out of enthusiasm for the thing. Now I realize thats
a bit a naive assessment of the equation due to the paycheck of
UnaMesa never taken in account.
Nevertheless, as you now also have to, I wont just give up behaving as
this still would be an voluntary project - though it hasn't really
been to some extent, as we just found out - it would be really death
for me otherwise. So I'll continue to ask questions and also make
TiddlyTools plugin requests with the hope that they might be
voluntarily met - wont take anti-depressants if the aren't ;-) - but
just try an other approach to what I want to get at, or give up in a
particular direction. Just as is was till now. I feel that's still in
everyone's interest.
I wish you the best in every respect. Who knows what the future might
bring?
PS: > > > Re. TiddlyWeb - now it's REALLY hard to decipher what's
going on ..
It really is scary. If anything goes wrong, how can one ever provide a
'minimal' test case? I've just been in the process of trying to strip
one down, and it's been weeks of many hours in my free time to slowly
figure it out, and that's just to derive a stand-alone! Many of the
plugins which come with it by default don't even have a description or
list dependencies..
Måns
>
> right now, it's amateur hour
Pay the man ;-)
wolfgang
>
> You need to get paid to be called a pro - right?
>
> Pay the man ;-)
that much shorter - it's really difficult to even imagine how many $$$$
$$$ would be needed.
Alex Hough
As a recipient of your freely given help over the years I sincerely
hope I can help in some way - I am not sure how at the moment though,
apart from cash.
It would be very interesting to see if some TiddlyFans could spin some
kind of business model operation out of TW. I've often thought "I
wish my real world worked as well as TiddlyWorld."
I think I could have sold TW solutions to customers in the past, but
have backed off because I didn't have the experience or expertise to
deliver something professional. I've only every presented TW as
prototypes and they have not been part of convincing enough projects
to generate serious funds.
GET OUR BUSINESS HEADS TOGETHER ?
I wonder if TiddlyFans might want to get their heads together outside
the Google Group? Bauwe and I Skype from time to time, it would good
to talk to the other European TW people, Måns, Tobias, Mario. One of
the things I like about TW culture is its Euro-Centric make up. I may
be quite alone here in Manchester but I really like this aspect of the
"community" - and I do think that is not an inappropriate use of the
term
The point about governance is an interesting one that has come up
before, its an interesting one given the context - of open source
innovation. It would make a great study for a student of business (I
have made some enquiries for myself) - the story should be written up.
But I don't think governance should get in the way of some
entrepreneurial thinking.
Where I am in Manchester UK money is very tight and going to get worse
over the winter as funding is cut from many 3rd Sector and community
projects. It's these organisations which could benefit from
TiddlyThinking, open source and general Wikification but they are the
ones least likely to have decent budgets to spend. It's a price
sensitive end of the market, dependent on volunteers, volunteers would
would prefer "can operate Word, Powerpoint and Excel to proficient
standard" on their CV. TiddlyWiki - or any kind of wiki for that
matter - is quite a difficult sell to organisations without resource
to allocate to trying out new methods of working.
Having said all that, it might help if there was a compelling example,
a case study - an elevator pitch, (perhaps in video form?) - showing
the benefits of using TW and perhaps more importantly, the culture
that's developed around, it to an organisation. (Mån's use in his
school sounds very enlightened. Nordic pedagogy has a great reputation
in the UK, I'd love to see it in action and hear the user stories. If
it can save money and be easy to use then it will catch on)
got to go...
best wishes
Alex
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Yoann Babel
I don't want to spoil Eric's calling. I want to help him.
I must insist.
Did you see the google trends about TW ??? I'm not saying TW is bad,
on the countrary ! But i'm saying google said TW is fading away.
I just guess, from my own perspective and my own difficulties that is
partly due to the lack of global policie et repository.
Take the example of plugins.
It seem's logical to go there to find the last one http://www.tiddlywiki.com/#Plugins
? (updated the 3 nov 2011)
and what do we find here ?
http://tiddlyvault.tiddlyspot.com/ that is dead for more than 2 years
now and http://plugins.tiddlywiki.org/plugins/ that is not searchable
easily, and the last 3 month, we only see Eric's activities.
and http://news.tiddlyspace.com/ ??? is that a joke ?? I don't have a
clue of what this page is about.
Doesn't (at first glance) exactly give you the ideia of a great
organised active communnity, no ?
And for the documentation, you give plenty of links ... but the
question is : how easy are they to find WITHOUT asking on this
list ????
idem for the plugins.
How easy are they to find by themselfs ???
I, personnally, cannot follow 10 pages an mailing list to be aware of
what's new somewhere about TW.
When I compare to other communities, I don't have these kind of
problems.
Say Lua ?
I check the ML. I read the [ANN] post. And that's it. I know what is
happening.
Drupal ? idem, there is a page I have to check, and only one, I know
everything is here.
TW ?
The mailing list is not too active. No plugins announced for month ...
Is Eric the only one standing ???
Maybe I'm dumb and I have missed somthing, but googles trends seem's
to say I'm not the only one.
and what about TW5 ??? no new on this list for so many time ... do I
have to know the secret link hidden somewhere ?
look on http://www.tiddlywiki.com/ no new posted from 28 February 2011
till 20 October 2011 !!!
Don't misinterpret me !!!
I'm not critcising !!! Or let say, I know it's easy to criticize !!!
not so easy to "do" ;-)
I think that it would greatly help Eric to attract and keep users
since TW is really a great tool.
I think that you have everything ready, just lacking to organise it
correctly.
And, what about TilldlyWebSpace ? I don't understand to what part of
my remarks it answer ...
It have greatly evolved (in more than 2 years I haven't checked it).
But it doesn't answer where are the plugins and the "hot news" and the
doc, etc...
regards,
I' am a friend despite a little "irony" in my style of writing (and
I'm french ... not my native langage, not always so easy to explain my
ideas)
On Nov 8, 2:30 pm, Måns <humam...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Yoann
>
> > It is slowly dying.
> > Why ?
> > Because there is no [ANN] list for plugins, or some recognized central
> > area where to find them, and for more than 2 years, we have the
> > feeling that nothing happens in the TW sphere ...
> > Maybe also because TW5 is not coming out, and people look for freash
> > new tech elsewhere.
>
> You haven't noticed what happened with TiddlyWeb/Space during the last
> two years?
> If that's not freash new tech - please tell what is??
wolfgang
> doc, etc...
>
Actually took a break for quite some time from TW group and was
happily using a TW version 2.5. When I checked back to find out what a
year and whole version number later has additionally brought, I only
found developers speech, which I was unable to understand. So I'm
still almost clueless - the only new feature I just got aware of a day
ago I can't find instructions for to be able to use it to it's full
potential. Add to that that already now some even so consistently well
designed plugins like Eric's don't work anymore... oh well..
It's really no surprise that only very few new users get attracted.
Måns
You'll find some documentation about templating in the TiddlySpaceDocs
if you search for "tscan": http://docs.tiddlyspace.com/#%5B%5BtsScan%20macro%5D%5D
I checked out plugins.tiddlyspace.com, however there was nothing -
then I went to http://translations.tiddlyspace.com, made a clone (by
including it into a new space) and called it extentions:
I changed the SiteTitle and the tagname "translation" to "plugin" in
the tscan macro used in the Welcom tiddler: http://extentions.tiddlyspace.com
It shows all sites with a SiteInfo tiddler tagged with "plugin"....
If you click on the icon in the middle of the backstage you'll get
searchoptions which will let you search across the TiddlySpaceVerse
for anything you want...
You can create a Space which will fetch all kinds of material
published on TiddlySpace - and you are free to do so.
If you have a great idea for collecting documentation about plugins
(i.e. get the description slice and throw it into the template )
please sign up to TiddlySpace and I'll add you as a member of the
extentions space...
TiddlySpace isn't a new TiddlyWiki - it's a framework which lets us
use and exploit new ways of using tiddlywiki online - it has some
great features, like creating HTML representations of tiddlers and
binary files (yes you can upload images etc ...)
It would be really nice if some of "the old hackers" started using it
- so things could get more available from one place - TiddlySpace...
Cheers Måns Mårtensson
wolfgang
> if you search for "tscan":http://docs.tiddlyspace.com/#%5B%5BtsScan%20macro%5D%5D
>
mistaken thinking the new templating feature would be a feature of the
TW core itself. Now it seems it's actually a TiddlySpace plugin which
doesn't do much more than ForEach already could since a long time in
stand-alones?
> If you click on the icon in the middle of the backstage you'll get
> searchoptions which will let you search across the TiddlySpaceVerse
> for anything you want...
>
get 16 entries, for the 'systemConfig' tag 8, and both together it
shows just 9 plugins?? (in each of my TWs I'll find more...)
> You can create a Space which will fetch all kinds of material
> published on TiddlySpace - and you are free to do so.
> If you have a great idea for collecting documentation about plugins
> (i.e. get the description slice and throw it into the template )
> please sign up to TiddlySpace and I'll add you as a member of the
> extentions space...
>
13MB TW where I imported all plugins until two years ago, exactly
because 'TiddlyHub' seemed never to catch up. 1300 systemConfigs and
almost 300 scripts in total. Though it's outdated I still always find
something useful or a hind where to look for.
At the time of it's creation FF wasn't that stable and often crashed
with this TW. Now that would be very improved..
> TiddlySpace isn't a new TiddlyWiki - it's a framework which lets us
> use and exploit new ways of using tiddlywiki online - it has some
> great features, like creating HTML representations of tiddlers and
> binary files (yes you can upload images etc ...)
>
dare to go there without the ability to create minimal testcase wikis
to ask for help, or find a mistake myself as a non-developer? All
those dependencies make it that much less hack-able.
> It would be really nice if some of "the old hackers" started using it
> - so things could get more available from one place - TiddlySpace...
>
'includes': system-plugins, 'system-info' and 'system-images' do. Do I
need all these 83 'excludeLists' tiddlers, or can I delete them and
still have it fully functioning as with a regular stand-alone TW?
Måns
> can I delete them and still have it fully functioning as with a regular stand-alone TW?
Cheers Måns Mårtensson
PMario
http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki/browse_thread/thread/4859ad73dd9085cd
have fun!
mario
Måns
Sorry for the short answers...
able to do sth like:<<list filter [tag[someTag]
template:someTemplate>> > I must be doing something wrong, because
tag 8, and both together it> shows just 9 plugins?? (in each of my TWs
I'll find more...)
why... > You know what I do when I need to search for a plugin? I open
exactly> because 'TiddlyHub' seemed never to catch up. 1300
systemConfigs and> almost 300 scripts in total. Though it's outdated I
still always find> something useful or a hind where to look for.> > At
the time of it's creation FF wasn't that stable and often crashed>
with this TW. Now that would be very improved..
related plugins and scripts) to TiddlySpace you can collect all of
them in your own library/space of plugins and scripts -1 To provide an
overview for visitors2 Let other spaceusers benefit from your
collection3 Have a FAST loading TW with direct access to ALL plugins
and scripts you have collected .. > If I can already have all these
ability to create minimal testcase wikis> to ask for help, or find a
mistake myself as a non-developer?
and delete all systembags (or make them private)
get some extra options to interact with other spaces - and share your
work in ways that wasn't possible before..As long as you don't change
any of the TiddlySpace-system-plugins TiddlySpace is just sth. which
happens from the backstage.IF you change some of the TSsystemPlugins/
tiddlers you might get in trouble when there is an upgrade taking
place - otherwise you are left alone with your own TW....
"Spaces" and click each spacename you'll get a list of tiddlers
included from those spaces...
http://themes.tiddlyspace.com (include it by writing "classictheme" in
the "includes"tab in the backstage to the left).Then I have a "normal"
looking TW, which behaves like one I would download from
tiddlywiki.com...
Downloading and uploading.
It's very easy to upload an original "one-file"TW from Your hdd to
TiddlySpace. Simply select import from the backstage and choose
whether the uploaded tiddlers should be Private or Public. (If you
change your mind you can always batchconvert them from the backstage
"Batch")...
Since uploading a TW to TiddlySpot has stopped working - this IS the
way to get your local TW to the net. (If you don't use your own server
and a ftp-client of course...)
I download a Space in three different ways:1) Go to the backstage to
the left - click the export tab and click download.(I don't really
need this because it downloads ALL plugins also the TiddlySpace
specific plugins and tiddlers - and I don't believe the synchronize
back to the server thing seems to work very well - please correct me
if I'm wrong...)2) Same as 1) however I import all tiddlers except
those which are serverspecific into a "normal" empty TW.(I change
View- and EditTemplates accordingly - so they don't use/try to show
user icons etc... - If I used "classictheme" - that's not a
problem... )3) I import the tiddlers I want from a Space (TiddlySpace
is Cors enabled) directly into a local TiddlyWiki...
Cheers Måns Mårtensson
Måns
from another (locked) instance of this thread...
I will try to correct it here:
twgrp
Having gone back and forth to TW over the years I've "met" so much
generosity in this community, but Eric is truly in a class by himself.
BTW, regarding contributions, I found this service a while back:
http://flattr.com/
It has a different, hmm, slice to it. Briefly, you decide *in advance*
how much you want to spend on contributions for that month. If flattr-
button A is clicked 10 times, button B 4 times and button C 1 time -
then, at the end of the month, A gets 10/15 of the whole sum , B gets
4/15 and C 1/15. I think it is a perfect concept for a community.
Another note regarding contributions, especially for super
contributors such as Eric:
I've long missed a central place dealing with "all" things tiddly. I
believe the problems mentioned in this thread are much due to a
lacking central effort (ie, the info/plugin/etc often exists...but
where?) Attempts solving parts of this, or even all of this, have been
made [1] but non quite succesful yet. IF there was such a place,
including eg. a discussion board or a knowledge wiki and [links to]
plugins, we could include something like the above mentioned
flattr.com solution in the templates for *every* post made and every
[link to] a plugin! Instead of eg. adding stars to a post, one could
voluntarily click for a little contribution (and without going through
the paypal hassle every time).
Heck, what about UnaMesa hosting a regular PayPal account that the
users voluntarily could pay into in advance to then 'distribute' as
per the flattr idea? If we had such a central place, I imagine it
should be an easy task to make a flattr-like local plugin. Then, as
per the flattr idea, at the end of the month (or other fequency?)
there is an automated payout into the receivers paypal accounts. You
know, I wouldn't even mind seeing an individual like Eric setting up a
private account where I could put in a little money that can then -
flattr like - be automatically distributed on eg a monthly basis to
*other* contributors paypal accounts. (Someone as established in the
community and so incredibly generous would likely not suddenly
"disappear"). Or maybe the team behind tiddlyweb/tiddlyspace which
seems to be the ideal place for a central community site.
Yet an idea would be to host such a flattr-type button in (some) very
plugins! It would bring the contribution out much more in the open and
remind people as they fiddle with their TW's. Note that if the user
has not pre-paid anything, then pressing such a button does not result
in anything so he has nothing to worry about. For someone like Eric,
an idea would be a flattr type plugin that, when installed by the
user, creates a button in the head for all other ELS plugins that the
user has installed, and when pressed it executes... etc.
This concept would not solve the potential wish to tip for verbal
contributions, such as here on the board, but maybe it's a step in the
right direction and worthy of a try?
Come to think of it, TW "ought to" have a backstage tiddler showing
statistics ranking the frequency of use for the plugins, or rather the
names of the plugin creators - and possibly a donation button next to
each ("My goodness, this guy has contributed to x% of my general TW
use!? He deserves a little click here!")
Further ideas:
A polling type system. When experts share their knowledge here or in
the form of plugins there is a risk that they only serve a few, or
even one, individual. A poll e.g regarding which plugins to develop
should increase the chances for contributions and tips by serving many
at a time. Would be perfect for a central community type place but
also possible as a stand alone (perhaps on tiddlyspace).
An extension of this would be "collective fund raising type tipping
solution". I started writing an explanation for this here but decided
that I'll let you think about it yourself because it would involve
some intricacies that I believe had better 'mature in the head' before
discussed. Just one thing though; Do recall that contributions are
voluntary to begin with, as is putting in dev time. Also, if the money
were to be placed with an intermediary host as suggested above, then
it wold again merely be a matter for the 'user' to decide how to
*distribute* money that is *already* given for contributions! (Eg. I
put in X dollars and then click 5 times on "issue" #6, 2 times on #12
and 1 time on #4)
I've seen other places such as, hm, was it the discussion boards for
phpBB or MyBB (they are open source forum software) where individuals
offer their professional services for solving specific issues and
prioritizing the individuals that contribute monetarily to them.
Obviously charging money does not need to restrict the open source
nature of the resulting code. (BTW their discussion forums use their
own forum software)
/Mat
[1]
Tiddlywiki.org - http://tiddlywiki.org/
Tiddlyhub/repository - http://plugins.tiddlywiki.org/plugins/
The Community space - http://community.tiddlyspace.com/ (an attempt
I'm associated with and hope to return to some day)
tiddlygrp
I wish you success. Your plugins are a great inspiration.
What makes your work so important is that it is focused on tiddlywiki
itself. I value that much more than the developments in tiddlyspace.
For me tiddlyspace looks just like another server based system, but
tiddlywiki is special.
wolfgang
keep myself short.
> You should be able to do sth like:
> <<list filter [tag[someTag] template:someTemplate>>
already does? - maybe only to realize that it wont be as capable?
> If you ported your plugins...
First they aren't mine, and I know for sure at least Eric wouldn't be
glad to have his earlier versions of plugins or scripts distributed.
They are already collected without the slightest need of the for me
not understandable or hackable technology of Tiddlyspace. For sharing
it I only would have to share a link to my dropbox (but only if Eric
explicitly allows). And it already loads under 3 seconds from my
drive, which no online version could beat.
By the way, I already made a detailed link list of all TWs with update
dates from which I imported everything from on tiddlywiki.org's page:
"Where do I find plugins?". Tiddyspace's new version only made this
list gone! For destroying former already sparse contributions of this
community TiddlySpace wouldn't have been needed, don't you think?
> I don't agree - I still think of a space as a normal TiddlyWiki.
pressure: that I could delete everything as it is the case with a
'normal' TW (..without making a backup ;-). I beat my self and
destroyed my first Tiddlyspace faster than any TW before: under a
minute!
Do I need a paid consultant now I can't afford? - Certainly not,
because standalone TWs simply work. Or I'm able to track a serious
error myself.
As it seems now Tiddlyspace isn't normal and client centered at all.
It's crowded with tiddlers which aren't delete or tagable, so in my
view they don't deserve to be called 'tiddlers', even in it's most
minimal state it's tab tags is already crowded with tags with no use
for any user.
Please clean this up, at the most have only one single systemConfig
tiddler with all the Tiddlyspace stuff, it's anyway completely
interdependent and undocumented stuff which should really be invisible
or shadowed. And better still, include it with a script in
MarkupPostBody shadowed tiddler.
Tobias Beer
First and foremost, you have been the #1 resource in the TiddlyWiki
community for as long as I know it and I would not like at all to
slowly see you leave this place.
I am most grateful that you parted some of your valuable knowledge on
the inner workings of this marvelous piece of self-empowerment with
me ...and most all of us here and elsewhere.
I believe, TiddlyWiki has a lot of potential to empower individuals on
so many levels. But those potentials cannot fully unfold for a number
of reasons which, I believe, are...
- the standalone paradigm, lacking fundamental server-side and
messaging concepts as well as a harmonized "external resource
management"
- an overblown core that imposes much more than a "core" really has
to ...or perhaps a basic MVC pattern that woud allow to easily swap,
at least, the VC part of the portfolio
- an incredibly powerful TiddlyWeb which, presumably, way too quickly
had been pushed onto a "market" (?!?) dressed up in TiddlySpace
garment
...but let's not blame TiddlySpace for things. It sure has helped to
further improve its much more essential foundation... which is
TiddlyWeb... thanks to a certain group of very inspirational
masterminds behind both, including Jeremy.
When it comes to good ol' TiddlyWiki, I would have hoped by now that a
core had emerged (with TiddlyWiki 5?) which is streamlined in just the
same way as a linux kernel supposedly is... or maybe was in some
idealized, imaginary version of it.
I agree with most of the so far articulated criticism, especially with
all those that call for - and have long called for (including myself)
- a powerful COMMUNITY PLATFORM, i.e. a plugin / documentation / use-
case / etc... repository for the TiddlyVerse.
I wish this TiddlyVerse had a different "core" in terms of a central
vision, basic tentets and yes, marketing efforts, ...for a "good" and
open-source cause... which made it way more accessible to "the world"
at large.
I believe, the missing link truly is a server-side that comes along
with the very same spirit of simplicity, expressiveness and
flexibility as TiddlyWiki... which to mold and bake one is free to
explore ...with a reasonable level of expertise, of course ...and,
well, resource requirements.
Besides being based on python, I don't even think that TiddlyWeb is
that far from being exactly that. Heck, if python hosting were as
popular and freely available as PHP hosting, TiddlyWeb would have
gained significantly more momentum by now.
Although Wolfgang (and in terms of silence, Eric, too) expressed a
certain reluctancy, I do indeed believe that TiddlySpace (or rather
TiddlyWeb) is a much understated technology that follows exactly this
paradigm... opening up the idea of whatever a "tiddler" represents to
a larger public.
But then, there is a certain conflict of interest between the self
empowering, standalone TiddlyWiki that we know and have grown to
cherish with all its somewhat hidden, yet feature rich expressiveness
which sure is difficult to decipher and to unveil for noobs or which
for one (who is required to follow "governance" principles or one who
desperately wishes there was a multiuser enabled environment) finds
difficult to rely on the one hand ...and the "centralized" hack- and
expandable community-thing, namely Tiddlyspace, that makes content
generation and sharing "oh so easy" on the other... but maybe also
vulnerable.
Rather than providing a solid server side, TiddlySpace tries to
compete on a playground where by default it seems to have a tough
standing in terms of marketing budget, conversion potential or
professional appearance that in no way compare to that of Facebook,
Google+ or many, many other content authoring and sharing platforms
like Tumblr, Soup.io and Co.
Maybe, just maybe, TiddlySpace not only hardly lives up to the
potential that TiddlyWeb has in store but also imposes a governance
pattern to current (server-side) TiddlyWiki development efforts which
creates a funny feeling to a significant number of formerly self-
empowered tiddly-enthousiast.
One thing is for sure, ServerSides are the way to go in the
TiddlyWorld... based on the powerful idea of a tiddler (or whatever
you want to call it) and the ease of web based data manipulation that
javascript provides... to end users.
The missing link has always been equally powerful, adaptable server-
sides... providing a persistence layer based on the most simple
patterns conceivable... if not, exactly those that TiddlyWeb already
does entail.
If TiddlyWebWiki were to marry with projects like Diaspora,
BitTorrent, even Erlang, then we could talk business... but I find it
hard to believe that a "have your TiddlySpace" kind of playground will
live up to its underlying potential, at all... although I do indeed
enjoy my admittedly unstructured (and way too random) 5 minutes of
playing with it here and there.
Although I would believe that Eric himself never seemed to participate
in or muh care for the server side of the requirement basket (and this
might well be the reason for him being cut off from the funding end) I
think he stands for all the basic goodness that TiddlyWiki can deliver
and for imposing a rigorous filter that does not give up on
expressiveness for half-baked implementations, eventually failing to
live up to this or that web-trend... or maybe not; who knows.
By all means, I wish you good luck, Eric, and so do I for whomever
contributes to this very educating and marvelous project and the very
enabling potential it unleashes.
I certainly intend to keep on contributing to this project, as I have
in the past, on a plainly voluntary basis... unless, of course, I
figure out a way to turn this into a business from which both benefit
to a reasonable extend ...the TiddlyVerse and myself.
Cheers, Tobias.
iain
praise for Eric's work and support for the whole TW community.
But secondly I too have thought that TW is slowly dying. I am a user
not a developer - I want tools for my work because I love my work
(history and archaeology) and am not skilled or particularly
interested in programming. I have modified and customised Dave
Gifford's/Morris Gray's basic tool for note taking but am frustrated
by problems with updating the basic TW core and with browser
incompatibilities. Surely these are key issues, something you
shouldn't need to figure out work arounds to deal with.
I am beginning to wonder whether for what I use TW for, which is note
taking and organisation of historical information, Microsoft (there I
said it) One Note might not be more effective and user friendly.
yours
Iain
tiddlygrp
you mention that you think the #1 missing resource is a server side
for tw. I rather think what is missing is a defined protocol in terms
of syntax and semantics for tiddlers (i.e. exchange of tiddlers
between tw and server and different tw's). The need and applications
for server side tw's are very diverse, but with a protocol we could
use tiddlyweb and also drupal, xmpp, google pages, ... you name it as
a server backend. But if you look at tiddlyweb it defines its own
(not standardized) tiddler fields in JSON with semantics attached to
them specifically for tiddlyweb. So we need a better tiddler
definition. The minimum needed is a tiddler uuid and a semantic
definition of what is meant by it (including versioning). Currently
tiddlers are identified by title, which is ok for tw use, but not
enough once you move to server sides.
But there is more to be developed. We should also look at other
developments, like Ward Cunningham's federated wiki (a tw frontend
would be nice).
Focusing too much on a server side is in my opinion a dead end. There
are already countless server based partially tw alike solutions. The
strengths of tw are its standalone possibility and the (theoretical)
ability to communicate with a variety of servers.
And I also think the core should be made more readable, modularized
code. tw could also use external libraries for e.g. communication
with a server (backbone.js). And also we could improve the non-js
visibility by a different layout of the tw source file.
tiddlygrp
twgrp
the general reference to UnaMesa's cut down budget, Eric clearly
states that:
"From a personal perspective, the problem is simple: in order to
continue providing full-time support to the worldwide TiddlyWiki
community, I must quickly find a way to replace the loss of revenue
from UnaMesa,"
so little point in discussing that in this thread. Eric is one of the
willing "makers" of TW - but the issue here and now is purely
FINANCIAL.
Other than a direct contribution to http://www.TiddlyTools.com/#Donations
I think it makes sense to discuss more general solutions to this and
this is why I brainstormed about simplifying tipping and contributions
in my earlier post here.
:-)
Miles Fidelman
> GET OUR BUSINESS HEADS TOGETHER ?
>
>
> before, its an interesting one given the context - of open source
> innovation. It would make a great study for a student of business (I
> have made some enquiries for myself) - the story should be written up.
> But I don't think governance should get in the way of some
> entrepreneurial thinking.
>
>
What with Jeremy and Erik both looking for some ways to support both
TiddlyWiki and themselves, it seems like this is the time to start
thinking business model and organization very seriously.
And in that regard, two possible models suggest themselves:
1. Zotero (Zotero.org) is a bibliographic tool for managing research
citations. It runs as both a stand-alone browser plug-in, and in
concert with a central server for sharing bibliographic records. It's
as, or more, capable than commercial products and has a significant
following among academic researchers. It strikes me as an effort of
comparable scope to Tiddly.
The project "lives" within the "Roy Rosenzweig Center for Historiy and
New Media" in the Dept. of History and Art History, at George Mason
University - with work funded by several foundation grants. I.e., a few
techies are employed by a grant to develop and maintain the software,
within a university department.
It strikes me that Jeremy and Erik might have some serious discussion
with UnaMesa about how to set up a similar arrangement under UnaMesa's
501(c)3 umbrella, and pursuing foundation and/or corporate sponsors for
the work.
2. Talk to the folks behind CouchDB about how they ended up operating
under the Apache Software Foundation, and how they support themselves
and the continued development of CouchDB.
At some point, Tiddly is going to live or die by whether or not the
folks most committed to it find a long-term model for supporting the
software and themselves.
(Just one man's opinion.)
Miles Fidelman
chris...@gmail.com
I've been waiting for an appropriate moment to join this collection
of threads, and this paragraph below feels like it provides that
moment. Before I get into that, though, I'd first like to say:
It's a curious thing that Eric's expression of a need to ensure his
livelihood somehow managed to devolve into a huge pile of complaining,
demanding and introspection on what's wrong with the tiddly* community.
At such times I would think it far better to celebrate and remind
ourselves of the huge contributions that Eric has made over the years to
the community. His work on creating, maintaining and documenting plugins
is second to none and his efforts to ensure that the TiddlyWiki core
keeps its promises have been outstanding, even if the face of sometimes
different priorities from elsewhere.
So, congratulations to Eric on his many years of work. I'm confident
that as a community we will be able to work out ways to ensure that
he can continue to contribute.
I hope that's not at all controversial. The controversial part comes
next, below:
On Thu, 10 Nov 2011, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> At some point, Tiddly is going to live or die by whether or not the folks
> most committed to it find a long-term model for supporting the software and
> themselves.
I completely disagree with this, and I think it is the prevelance of
this attitude in this thread which has contributed to me becoming
angry and finding it hard to find a way into the thread that is
clear and focused.
Tiddly lives and dies by the efforts of its community. Not by
business, business interests, or even leaders.
Tiddly is a thing in its own right with a community of participants
who all have free and easy access to:
* create documentation
* contribute code
* report bugs
* demonstrate cool functionality
In one of his earlier message Miles asks that Tiddly be more like,
e.g., Linux.
Back when I first started using Linux, I guess in about 1992, maybe
93, Linus and a few core devs were responsible for making patches
and distributing tarballs. I installed Linux via SLS, a distribution
packaged by someone who was not Linus nor one of those core devs.
Later as the community grew someone got the bright idea to start the
Linux Document Project (source of Howtos and the like). That wasn't
a core dev either.
A while later I was using Linux to run an ISP. We had features that
we needed in the packages that ran our services. We mades patches to
apache, qpopper, PAM, innd and contributed them back to the
communities that surrounded them. My employer, the ISP, paid me to
make those contributions back to the free (as in beer) software that
made our business possible.
TiddlyWiki is rather unique in its nature as a standalone piece of
software. It is less easy to connect back to a community than say
something like Apache or Linux. This does not, however, obviate the
responsibility the community has to the health of TiddlyWiki itself
and the TiddlyWiki community.
I'm not sure when it happened (because I have not been observing the
community for that long) but at some point the TiddlyWiki community
stopped operating as one. Perhaps it was when Osmosoft was bought by
BT. It sometimes seems like at that point people decided "oh there
is money now, BT will take care of it."
That's never been the case and never should have been the case. BT
bought Osmosoft to understand open source operations yet bizarrely
TiddlyWiki has become less and less operational as an open source
project since the purchase.
BT's engagement with TiddlyWiki ought to be much like the ISP
(above) engaging with various software: It contributes back to the
community those improvements which it finds valuable to itself. For
example BT wanted a certain type of server-side so they paid me to
make one (more on TiddlyWeb below).
The maintenance of the community, though, should have been and needs
to be (for the sake of just distribution of power) done by the
community and the simple truth is this has not happened. There are
presumably a few reasons for this. Some of it is that perceived
"leaders" didn't step up in an effective fashion:
* When Jeremy was sucked up by the BT spaceship his availability
vaporized. Perhaps that will change now with his recent news.
* Martin, who has been the inside Osmosoft lead of TiddlyWiki
development, has not engaged the community with alacrity.
* Eric, though his contributions are extremely valuable, insists on
keeping them in a format that is not accessible to open source
processes such as version control, forking, patching, issues
tracking, etc. Nor has he, despite many invitations, become a
proper contributor in the core code, using git etc.
* Those of us with monetary relationships with Osmosoft (me, Ben,
Jon, Colm, once upon a time FND, but no longer) have
resposibilities which do not prioritize TiddlyWiki but instead
business goals given to them by the people with the money and
their own developing careers.
* The (probably unrealistic) expectation that UnaMesa, in addition
to providing hosting for things like trac.tiddlywiki.org, would
provide human engagement in the community, went unfulfilled.
Some of it is that the combination of those 5 items above created a
space that looked like it was going to be filled at any moment, so
other participants need not apply or try.
Some of it has been a perception that TiddlyWeb and TiddlySpace were
taking some of the energy. I don't think that's true at all. TWeb
and Space don't change TiddlyWiki. And you do not dimish a candle by
lighting another. These projects can coexist but in order for them to
do so the expectation that people working on only one or two of the three
is somehow taking away from the other must go away. For example I
don't work on TiddlyWiki. I just don't. I'm not supposed to and nor
do I want to. That's not wrong. That just is. There are plenty of
other people in the world who _do_ work on TiddlyWiki.
But, I'd argue, in the end it is because the community of users that
surround tiddly* didn't just do it themselves. That's what open source
really means. It doesn't mean getting free stuff. It means signing up
for a club in which in exchange for providing your expertise (whether it
be testing, developing, writing, explaining, promulgating, or simply
being a positive force of feedback and encouragement (btw, an aspect
which people way undervalue and should not)) you get legitimate access
to use some free stuff and the free expertise of the community.
Everything that TiddlyWiki needs to be a fully operational and
working open source community is available for free: source control,
websites, wikis, mailing lists. If things aren't the way you want
them to be, then please, gather some comrades and fix it. Fixing it
can be as much as the whole kit, or it can be as simple as making
sure that the issues you have are more accurately reported in the
issue trackers associated with the projects. It's in _your_ hands.
Which leaves me to talk a bit about TiddlyWeb. It's been suggested
that it is:
* too hard and too inaccessible (by virtue of power, complexity and
language choice)
* that is it not powerful enough (by not engaging in things like
federated wiki)
* that it violates some principle of how tiddlers ought to be
Perhaps, but TiddlyWeb is in fact exactly what it was designed to
be. It is an implementation of an idealized HTTP API for accessing,
storing and composing tiddlers on the web that is designed for
maximum flexiblity and general usefulness for creating
tiddler-based web applications. Note I say "tiddler", not
"tiddlywiki".
By which I mean that it, by design:
* uses a readable programming language
* has a plugin architecture that lends itself to open source
development and visibility
* prioritizes inspection of the code over simple installation (even
though installation is one step on mature systems)
* allows tiddlers to be represented in many ways, not just in
TiddlyWiki
The end result is a toolkit for collaborating via tiddlers but it is one
that considers itself at least as much an education and uplift tool as a
useful piece of software. The original description was that TiddlyWeb
would be a reference implementation of the API, leading to other
implementations, from the community if they were interested, that were
more suited to particular environments, such as installing on PHP
hosting services.
So to join this last section of the message to the first: If
TiddlyWeb is not what you want it to be, you have the power to
influence it, to change it, or even to ignore it. You. The same goes
for TiddlyWiki and TiddlySpace. This is both the blessing and the
curse of _real_ open source projects.
I very much want all the tiddly* projects to be real open source
projects. With active and diverse contributions from the entire
community. It is very clear from the messages in recent days that
there are loads of really good ideas on how things ought to be. As a
community we need to turn these conversations into action.
I hope very much that we hear from Jeremy, Eric and Martin on these
issues very soon. Their involvement is not critical to success but
their expertise will certainly make it easier.
--
Chris Dent http://burningchrome.com/
[...]
Jeremy Ruston
beginning, and his willingness to share his expertise is now one of
the hallmarks of our community. I've been privileged to spend many
happy evenings chewing the fat with him in Sunnyvale. I'll pick up
some of the other topics from this thread separately, but the main
thing is to address Eric's central crisis. I'll explain what I've
tried to do in the past, and what I plan to do now.
When I joined BT I tried to address Eric's needs by persuading BT to
support UnaMesa, which they have generously continued to do after my
departure (albeit the amount has been reduced in recent years in line
with BT's internal cost cutting programme). We failed, though, to
bring any other supporters on board, making it hard to give Eric the
level of income he deserves.
The thing that might not be clear from the outside is that at the time
of the Osmosoft acquisition BT weren't really terribly interested in
TiddlyWiki itself; they wanted to bring me on board to help them
understand open source and to learn how to use it sensibly. TiddlyWiki
was part of my qualifications, but not really of specific interest.
That's changed now; Osmosoft is all about TiddlySpace, TiddlyWeb and
TiddlyWiki. If the projects using them really take hold in BT then
perhaps we'll be able to persuade BT to offer more support to the
community.
Now I've chosen to leave BT because I crave the independence of being
able to work with a much wider range of clients. I don't expect a
great deal of my consultancy work to be directly about TiddlyWiki, but
it will absolutely be *because of* TiddlyWiki. So, one of my first
goals is to give some love and polish to TiddlyWiki, to make it be a
decent calling card. I love coding, and haven't done nearly enough for
a long time.
Now, Eric's work makes TiddlyWiki better and brighter, and so it makes
sense for me to try to support him directly out of my consultancy
income. I'll commit to a regular monthly donation, that will hopefully
rise as I get my teeth into my new working life.
Best wishes
Jeremy
> From a personal perspective, the problem is simple: in order to
> continue providing full-time support to the worldwide TiddlyWiki
> community, I must quickly find a way to replace the loss of revenue
> from UnaMesa, ideally without the distraction of finding and working
> on *non*-TiddlyWiki consulting projects. Of course, TiddlyTools.com
> is an open-source effort, so there are no licensing fees for the
> addons I have published, and my online assistance has also been
> offered free of charge. However, there *is* a "tip jar" form on
> TiddlyTools.com (see http://www.TiddlyTools.com/#Donations) that
> --
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>
--
Jeremy Ruston
mailto:jer...@osmosoft.com
http://www.tiddlywiki.com
Jeremy Ruston
>> At some point, Tiddly is going to live or die by whether or not the folks
>> most committed to it find a long-term model for supporting the software and
>> themselves.
>
> I completely disagree with this, and I think it is the prevelance of
> this attitude in this thread which has contributed to me becoming
> angry and finding it hard to find a way into the thread that is
> clear and focused.
The core of Mile's observation applies to both of us, though: we're
trying to secure a long term model for supporting ourselves while we
work on the software. I guess your point is that if either of us
failed to establish a viable model, then it shouldn't necessarily
imply the death of the software.
> * When Jeremy was sucked up by the BT spaceship his availability
> vaporized. Perhaps that will change now with his recent news.
Yes, that's what it felt like to me, too. Doing a good job in an
executive role in a big company has very, very little in common with
running an open source project. I'm relishing recovering my
independence.
Many thanks,
Jeremy
chris...@gmail.com
> The core of Mile's observation applies to both of us, though: we're
> trying to secure a long term model for supporting ourselves while we
> work on the software. I guess your point is that if either of us
> failed to establish a viable model, then it shouldn't necessarily
> imply the death of the software.
Not only should it not imply the death of the software, I think if it
even worries people about the death of the software, then there is
something very unhealthy happening in the community.
But beyond that I think it is important to keep in mind that though
I'm currently employed as a creator of a tiddly-related code I do not
believe that what I'm paid for is the code itself. The code is free,
it is merely an expression of my expertise. It is the expertise and
associated experience which is being paid for.
When you, Eric, I or anyone else is paid to improve tiddly* it is
because the payer needs it in either a faster or more direct way than
the community can provide OR they are doing what they feel is just in
the face of value they are getting from the community. Organizations
like BT, in general, can use money more easily than they can perform
the committed community participation that individuals provide in the form
of use, bug reporting, documentation, community assistance and plain
ol' writing code.
In the end, whatever the currency, the value obtained is membership and
participation.
Miles Fidelman
> Great post, thanks Chris. Your perspective on BT and Osmosoft is very valuable.
>
>>> At some point, Tiddly is going to live or die by whether or not the folks
>>> most committed to it find a long-term model for supporting the software and
>>> themselves.
>> I completely disagree with this, and I think it is the prevelance of
>> this attitude in this thread which has contributed to me becoming
>> angry and finding it hard to find a way into the thread that is
>> clear and focused.
> The core of Mile's observation applies to both of us, though: we're
> trying to secure a long term model for supporting ourselves while we
> work on the software. I guess your point is that if either of us
> failed to establish a viable model, then it shouldn't necessarily
> imply the death of the software.
Perhaps, more to the point, my observation, across multiple open source
(and other projects), dating pretty far back (ARPANET era) is that
"communities" are very amorphous things that are not capable of very
much without a level of organization. In the early stage, that
organization most often comes from an individual or core group who
is/are most committed to the project (usually the founders), eventually
evolving into an established set of procedures, tools, roles, etc. that
allow the project to move forward without them.
Perhaps the best example of this is the Apache daemon - starting as a
funded R&D project at NCSA (the "NCSA Daemon") with a team of people
behind it, with funding behind them. After a while, two things happened:
- a user community had developed around Apache
- NCSA decided it was no longer "researchy" and decided to kill its
involvement
Those two events led to a lot of turmoil, that, after several
incarnations, led to the Apache Software Foundation as a long-term home,
and the ecosystem, infrastructure, and community that maintains ongoing
support and development. (This is, of course, a simplified version of
the history - a better telling, and one that might be educational in our
context, is at http://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html)
There are lots more open source projects that have disappeared into
oblivion than have gone on to long-term viability. Survival seems to be
a mix of BOTH doing something useful to a large community, AND a small
leadership group that organizes the effort in a way that puts it on a
long-term, sustainable path. It probably doesn't matter if that group
is doing it for commercial reasons (e.g., building a company around a
core piece of open source code) or other reasons - though generally that
core group needs to find a way to support themselves and their efforts.
Whether it's a supportive employer (perhaps one who uses or otherwise
benefits from the software), or a business organized around the
software, both people and projects have real expenses - and it's a lot
easier to focus if one's "day job" aligns with the project.
Seems to me that, for Tiddly to move down that path, some core group
needs to provide the focus for a year or two - and Jerymy and Erik seem
like the obvious candidates.
Just one man's opinion, of course.
Tobias Beer
"I rather think what is missing is a defined protocol in terms
To not further lead this thread off topic (on my end),
I have moved my reply over here...
Tiddler-Based-Communication-Protocol
http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki/browse_frm/thread/2697193041b432d3#
Cheers, Tobias.
chris...@gmail.com
> Seems to me that, for Tiddly to move down that path, some core group needs to
> provide the focus for a year or two - and Jerymy and Erik seem like the
> obvious candidates.
Yes, this I agree with and am fully behind.
wolfgang
Thanks for sharing your inside views Chris and Jeremy, I really
appreciate.
>>> At some point, Tiddly is going to live or die by whether or not the folks
>>> most committed to it find a long-term model for supporting the software and
>>> themselves.
>>
>> I completely disagree with this, and I think it is the prevelance of
>> this attitude in this thread which has contributed to me becoming
>> angry and finding it hard to find a way into the thread that is
>> clear and focused.
>
> provide the focus for a year or two - and Jerymy and Erik seem like the
> obvious candidates.
contributing some more constructive. But then it also became very
clear that those voices of feeling insecure about the future of
TiddlyWiki - also because the involvment of non-transparent financial
interests - brought a sort of anger and grieve too: that a TiddlyWiki
depending on too few active developers could indeed die very quickly.
Though these feelings aren't particularly new: I too really needed to
take a break from the lack of regular contributors to this
'community'. It just doen't works for very long if only 1-2 seriously
commited developers are regularly giving dependable and professional
advise, like Eric and Fred at that time, and 1-2 enthusiasic users who
regularly check to give sufficient every-day use responses. Giving and
taking becommes too one-sided and sooner or later one can't help but
give up. One could deny or lament, but in the end that's how it's
been: Few out of enthusiasm will fill this lack with too much
engagement while exacty this lack of a broad 'community' sooner or
later makes it sort of a chore - not neccessarily by itself but
compounded by usually occuring demands of daily life - take a break
for some time and finally are gone. Don't think too often this happens
out of interrest in TiddlyWiki has outgrown itself, but here I can
only talk for myself. Sure there were always a couple of new
enthousiasts and this cycle rolled on.
And now the only one who could sustain this service at such a
professional level since it's beginnings could drop away!
Well, if that doesn't appear a bit bleak for the future of TW I don't
know what else! Preaching an ideal community in this situation surely
wont help. It isn't there in it's double-sense of voluntarity _and_
continuity. Just developers and users coming and moving on most of the
time with too rare exceptions. Where the possible lack of the rare
amounts to sort of a catastrophe.
Maybe my view is a bid out of relation, because I don't have any
experience with other software communities to compare, but that's been
the situation as it presented itself to me here as an at one point
very enthusiastic TiddlyWiki contributor to this support forum.
Beside having further degressed and maybe even miss-used this thread
of Eric for venting off - but I believe nevertheless this IS very
pertaining to the issue of Eric not being able to contribute anymore -
and very realistic fears what this would entail for TiddlyWiki.
However, now I'm also glad at least Jeremy could appease some of the
most immediate fears. Thanks again for everyone's contributions.
Julio
.."It just doen't works for very long if only 1-2 seriously
advise, like Eric and Fred at that time, and 1-2 enthusiasic users who
regularly check to give sufficient every-day use responses. Giving and
taking becommes too one-sided and sooner or later one can't help but
give up."
However, some of us, I'll take myself as an example here, are lurkers
and can't contribute more, because eventhough we are enthusiasts and
can "dabble" with Tiddlywiki are not to the level of others are far
understanding intristics. We are those forgotten weekend warriors who
can only tinker and enjoy what the knowledgeable few have to offer.
I wish I knew javascript and html, and css better and would be able to
dedicate full time to these. I do say this with a sense of guilt,
being that I have been following on and off this group for a couple of
years now. But, alas that is not possible. All I can do is play,
study, and tinker with random ideas from this group and searching
through the web. Hence my recent little test site at: Tiddlyspot [1].
This is what I consider that I can do at the present moment and
hopefully some others can benefit from this.
Remember, that "bad things happen for good reasons"...maybe this
exactly what needs to happen for Tiddlywiki community to wake up and
get that spark of energy again. Not that I want Eric to be in this
predicament at all...but you get my gist.
Be well everyone. :)
[1] http://jpen24mtc.tiddlyspot.com/
Jeremy Ruston
the tiddlywiki project is dying (or at least looking like it's dying
to outside observers), and that the resources around the project are
disorganised. There seem to be many potential contributors that
sometimes find it hard to get started.
I believe that one of the simpler causes is that over the last 4 years
the content of the main tiddlywiki site hasn't been actively updated
and managed. As a result of this neglect (and as we've been discussing
in a separate thread) many of the links at http://tiddlywiki.com/ have
been dying off, and none of the new stuff (like Julio's) has been
incorporated. As a result, to a new visitor, the project feels like at
worst it's dying, and at best that the community resources are
hopelessly hard to find and disorganised.
Part of the reason is that even before working at BT, I was pretty
unreliable at performing updates to the content; the process was
ridiculously tedious and error prone. There were two or three updates
by Osmosoft but they were fairly superficial.
tiddlywiki.com is the de facto focal point for users of TiddlyWiki,
and it should clearly lay out the available resources, and showcase
the activities of the community around the project. It really ought
to, for instance, list the few dozen plugins that are most widely
used; keeping that list up to date and authoritative shouldn't be an
onerous task to someone participating regularly in the discussion
groups. At the moment we all know that the FET plugin is critical to
lots of quite basic TiddlyWiki requirements, but you wouldn't know
that from poking around tiddlywiki.com.
The process to update tiddlywiki.com is much better now; there is a
staging space for the content for the content at
http://tiddlywiki-com.tiddlyspace.com/, and so we've got a lot of
flexibility for multiple authorship, and pulling in content from other
places.
So, now that I've got my independence, as I've mentioned before, one
of the things I want to do is start properly and regularly editing the
content of tiddlywiki.com. Tiddlywiki.com gets quite a lot of traffic,
and doing a better job of showcasing links to community created
resources, and bringing traffic to them may well improve the
incentives to do such things. There's already a separate thread about
the updates, please do shout if you've any suggestions, questions, or
offers of help.
Best wishes
Jeremy
> --
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wolfgang
> the content of the main tiddlywiki site hasn't been actively updated
You hit the head of the nail. And what I really wanted to emphasis
with my latest response was, how over-important the support here at
GoogleGroups became in such a situation. Whenever this support fails,
for example if only 1 out of 5 basic questions is answered, that
simply isn't very encouraging for every new-comer to stay.
wolfgang
repeated again at other occasions: A really centralized, comprehensive
and easy to navigate 'How to manual' for TiddlyWiki will very unlikely
ever materialize:
The possible adjustments, addaptability, possibilities with add-ons of
variing complexity is just too vast with TiddlyWiki's endless
possiblilties, the volutary active community just too small for such a
huge task.
Also a regularly updated central TiddlyWiki.com - or even tiddlywiki.-
com.tiddlyspace - will never be able to meet even a fraction of those
needs. (..where I nevertheless would sooo love being proven wrong!)
Such a huge task can ONLY be accomplished by fully featured modern
open source forum software, and thereby almost automatically. Where
all the new plugin contributions/updates have their quick to find
subforums, each plugin with more possibilites than could be documented
their own too. Just as any other kind of basic questions with their
own kind of subforum easy to cognize and navigate to. Thereby the most
actual answer to any question will automatically be apparent, And
threads still without answers wont travel that easily unrecognized
into the distant past and oblivion. Any plugin-vault which-ever-way
would become superflous too, it would be there with links to the most
actualized versions (actually every plugin ever made is already linked
to here somewhere in GoogleGroups, there is just no easy way to find
it ever again). No paste-bins necessary neither. No one needed to
update some information here or there. No need to remind of Goggle's
TW Deveolpers group, just move the post to that sub-forum.
I think it was Daniel who once took it upon himself to sumarize for a
while each month's most remarkable threads? Such onerous and still
fleeting work wouldn't have to be done at all - still without all the
really remarkable knowledge and advise being lost. And the workload
for the few regularly responding here would be just a fraction,
because the answers could be easily found already present most of the
times.
.
My assessment of the chance of my request for such a support forum
being met a few years ago was: '..that we probably still meet here in
one year's time at the most linear and difficult to navigate
GoogleGroops list'. Sadly, we are really still here, even many years
later.
.
It's really urgent guys. Let's Google's TiddlyWiki Groups die and set
up a fully functioning support forum. It's already late, but better
late than never!!!
It would simplfy so many things for having a centalized 'How to
manual' grow organically by itself. Many years later after first
giving this advise it still can't be made any easier. What could ever
speak against?
The best.
Richard Niolon
1) Tiddlywiki is in my mind the best software I've ever used. Thanks
Eric and Jeremy!
2) Tiddlywiki and google groups is great for the geeky amongst us...
but there are a whole lot of non-geeky people out there.
Aye, there's the rub.
There's a whole lot of non-geeky people who won't use a tiddlywiki
because it doesn't seem user friendly. Wait, wait... //I// know it is
pretty friendly, but //they// don't know that. They see code and get
nervous... they hear you need a "jar" file and get a little more
worried... they don't know if they are ready to commit to "importing
plugins"... and so they look for OneNote or an iphone app that does
whatever they need done for them, and they are quite willing to plunk
down a dollar or two for it. I know there's a lot underlying these
issues that is beyond our control and just has to be dealt with....
I think Wolfgang is right that we'll never have a thoroughly
comprehensive and complete manual of all things possible with
tiddlywiki... //but//
1) We could have a centralized tiddlywiki website - maybe it links out
to these other places that already exist, but noobs would know where
to start at least... and let me just say as a one-time-clear-geek who
is starting to realize the days are numbered regarding how long I can
claim membership in the geek club, I have more sympathy for the poor,
unwashed, uneducated masses of non-geeks...
2) We could have a "Getting Started" manual for new users that answers
questions... what are tiddlers, what are tags, can I save this online,
can I access this on my iphone, where do plugins come from (in the age-
restricted section :)
3) The site could be oriented around what you can //do// with a
tiddlywiki... tracking tasks and bits of information for projects,
personal website and blogging, teaching and training, writing... the
list doesn't have to be comprehensive, but rather a good starting
point. There could even be pre-configured tiddlywikis for some of
these, or walkthroughs of how to customize a tiddlywiki to do one
thing or another better, or user guides for productively using some of
the existing customized tiddlywikis...
If your thought is "Wait, that already exists! It's being done over
at..." then you've proven my point. Some of the existing work just
needs to be framed and explained to draw and keep new users and
tiddlywiki fans. Framed and explained... to draw and keep new
users...
Rich
Miles Fidelman
> I can only add a small amount to this discussion.
> 1) Tiddlywiki is in my mind the best software I've ever used. Thanks
> Eric and Jeremy!
> 2) Tiddlywiki and google groups is great for the geeky amongst us...
> but there are a whole lot of non-geeky people out there.
>
> Aye, there's the rub.
>
> There's a whole lot of non-geeky people who won't use a tiddlywiki
> because it doesn't seem user friendly.
Well... it's also not all that developer friendly. And THAT's the rub.
We just went through a technology evaluation process for building a
single-page application.
Now I really like Tiddly (except it's basic interface - for what we're
doing outline format, with click to expand/contract sections/subsections
would be a lot more useful) - but I sure as heck can't figure out how
all the pieces fit together to write a different UI on top of the common
internals.
And... pretty much everybody else on my team takes one look at Tiddly
and throws up their hands.
I expect we're going to go off and write our own framework for
single-page applications - because it sure looks a lot easier than
buliding on Tiddly. That's sort of a shame.
Yakov
community's problem, but there's no reason to discuss all the
community's problems here.. Eric, I'll try to fight all the banking
issues and establish constant donation asap.
But as this thread is that involved, it seems to be the best to go on
here. This is rather strange to hear that TW is dieing (sorry, idk how
this spells correctly). Eric's situation is a problem to solve, but
not a reason to panic. However, this showed that the lack of
documentation (here I mean "text that new user or a user which has a
common question should read") is of great importance for community and
the lack of it depresses many people. I understood this hindrance
right when I found TW (I needed a way to write hypertext terribly and
was seeking for mechanisms of interaction of web techs with file
system, but found an established solution which had.. scattered
documentation), so I decided that the only way to mantain hypertext
properly was to write my own "documentation" within a TW instance.
Now I really can't understand how other people fight the complexity of
TW without such notes/"documentation", but it seems that -- quite
problematically.
Here, we've heard two main ideas about the documentation in the first
sense -- or I'd call that "knowledge inheritance":
* mantain consistent documentation
* create a forum and some other infrastructure which would allow to
contribute easily
As for the second one, I can't say much as I've never seen a well-
organized forum about such a complex thing like TW. But I would be
careful and rather sceptical about the word "automatically" in the
worfgang's post, as TW is about hypertext which is quite complex by
its own, and TW is even more complex. I mean old-fashioned tree-like
forums don't seem to be the way to go (in my "documentation" of TW
transclusion is used here and there and convergion of different tree
branches would likely make mess). But let it be, I'm not that
confident in this matter.
As for documentation in usual sense..
> A really centralized, comprehensive and easy to navigate 'How to manual' for TiddlyWiki will very unlikely ever materialize
comprehensive 'How to manual' -- because TW itself has it's own
markup, styling system, data structures and macros, navigation,
workflow issues and more and with such a massive of technologues "How
to" is not a way to go. In my opinion, basic documentation can be only
sort of reference book -- more strict, with high density of
information. And not addresed to new users. Then, some howtos, can be
"attached" (some already exist, like [1] or others) after that -- they
should be small, simple, creative and probably rewritten from time to
time. Because these are the most difficult and perhaps intimate
questions -- what is TW and why one would benefit of it. In my
feeling, TiddlyWiki is a framework for mind which endures with web and
evolves with the community. However, this wouldn't be sufficient for a
person which is not familiar with TW.
Now my "no" to the citation is because I see the possibility that I
turn my "documentation" written in russian for myself into a public
documentation, but here are some serious issues:
1. I can't start publishing before I establish a "CMS" within a tw-
document which would allow to write different "versions" of tiddler
(short and with comments for personal use, public content in English
and perhaps public content in Russian). This is essential because if I
start to write a separate TiddlyWiki for documentation, it will sooner
or later will slide apart from my main document in the logic of
narration and after that texts will inevitably turn into a mess. This
is what I faced many times with other texts; I call this a "split".
I'm working on this system (basically it should do quite the same
thing as multilanguage support), but do this quite slowly and in
current circumstances it seems to be unacceptable.
2. I have no idea of how to turn such a thing into a contributable one
besides making a blog where I can post announcements of updates and
make preview of new chapters for preliminary discussion and clarifying
some questions.
3. Such a documentation will reflect subjective intersts anyway and
may make conflicts with developers' philosophy.
On the other hand, if someone establishes an "infrastructure" for
contributable documentation, I can provide material for each chapter
and suggest the structure of the text. Although not everything is
written in my document (for instance, descriptions of many macros are
just sketches).
As for now, I can show a "table of contents" of my current
"documentation" (note, though, that the text is not fully linear):
* [what is tiddlywiki, what are the unique features etc -- now
skipped]
* application notes (what for I use TW or think of using or am going
to use)
* working withing TW:
** syntax/markup and user-defined DOM
** styling
** user data structures (meaning tiddlers, tags, fields etc) and
macros
** TW interface and pre-defined stuff (not very well written, but
themes are discussed here and default interface like PageTemplate
should be)
** navigation, editing and managing links
** workflow
** TW limitations and desirable extenstion (the latter should be
ideally aggregated from the previous chapters)
* TW extensions:
** extension types and their installation/usage
** extension repositories and navigation through them
** interesting extensions (ok, this is subjective, but should
influence some previous chapters also -- like PasteUpPlugin which is
mentioned in the "workflow" chapter)
** TiddlyWiki-based tools
* TW in the context of file system, OS, browser, other TWs and systems
of writing and/or the web (perhaps this one should be splitted):
** operability of TW in the context of FS environment and OS
** operability and interaction with browsers (sort of known issues,
support details)
** local interaction of TW with non-TW files
** local interaction between TW documents
** TW for aggregation from the web (RSS aggregation, XMPPWiki)
** TW in the web
** [perhaps here will be the collaboration chapter, but I still have
no experience in this]
* Dev: writing extensions (this is not well-established part, so here
only subsections I already have):
** notes
** writing plugins
** dev of macros
** desired plugins to develope, their states (subjective, but can be
present in community documentation)
* core code and architecture (even less established)
** exploring core code
** core models and algorithms (only notes)
** elements of API
* personal section regarding ToDos, proposals, desires (community can
have similar thing)
* TiddlyWiki appearence; community and contribution (not very well
established)
A step back, though: I'd like to point that as tiddlywiki.org has
migrated (and unfortunately not fully migrated) to [2], one thing got
worse for sure: when one meets a MediaWiki page, he or she knows at
once that he *can* contribute. The TiddlySpace version needs big link
"how to contribute" to make this clear. But anyway, this rapid
migration haven't solved the main problem: the need of fundamental
text, not a pile of notes on different common things about TW.
[1] http://www.giffmex.org/twfortherestofus.html
[2] http://tiddlywiki.tiddlyspace.com/
Yakov
donated amount (the thing Mans asked about). Pledgie works directly
with PayPal, so if you think such a button is appropriate, you can try
it. It has some tax, though (3% as I can recall).
[1] http://pledgie.com/
Alex Hough
"the Tao of TiddlyWiki"
Inspiration: Tinderbox [1] software developed by Marc Bernstein is
supported by a book called the Tinderbox Way.
Content : general principals and design choices, key moments in
history of development and why I like TW ;chapters authored by
different people, interviews.
I remember reading on this list that Jeremy is a seasoned author:
there was photographic evidence of a book found in a second hand
store, at a seaside town... somewhere like Lynmouth if memory serves.
I can't find it on the internet. It don't know if dreamed this -- or i
saw such a book myself .... Wait!!! its on Amazon -- "PASCAL with Your
Basic Micro" - £12.20 [2]
Alex
[1] http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/TinderboxWay.html
[2] http://www.amazon.co.uk/PASCAL-Basic-Micro-Jeremy-Rushton/dp/0672220369/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321219955&sr=1-2
wolfgang
> "documentation" (note, though, that the text is not fully linear):
structured. The only real work that would have to be done is
extracting Google's TW threads and assign them to their fitting
subforum. Thereby most of it's content would already be there. And you
could greatly improve it by adding your material.
Personally, though a heavy user, wouldn't be able to write extensive
Documentation. Where I willingly would give a hand could be taking
part in placing the threads in their proper subforum.
chris...@gmail.com
> A step back, though: I'd like to point that as tiddlywiki.org has
> migrated (and unfortunately not fully migrated) to [2], one thing got
> worse for sure: when one meets a MediaWiki page, he or she knows at
> once that he *can* contribute. The TiddlySpace version needs big link
> "how to contribute" to make this clear. But anyway, this rapid
> migration haven't solved the main problem: the need of fundamental
> text, not a pile of notes on different common things about TW.
For the sake of history:
The hope, apparently not entirely well-founded, was that starting the
migration would get the ball rolling and the community at large would
do the rest. This didn't happen. A small number of people helped to
migrate additional content beyond what I started. Very small number,
relative to the number of people reading this group.
To me that was evidence that the information was not considered
relevant by the community. That's perhaps harsh, but that's how it
looked and it makes future efforts to improve the situation harder to
get off the ground.
I agree that adding a big "you can edit this!" and "how to contribute"
would be excellent.
chris...@gmail.com
>> There's a whole lot of non-geeky people who won't use a tiddlywiki
>> because it doesn't seem user friendly.
>
> Well... it's also not all that developer friendly. And THAT's the rub.
+1
I'm registering this +1 here because I don't want this comment from
Miles to pass by without notice. We all agree that TiddlyWiki is clever,
useful, interesting, thought provoking and revolutionary at its time of
birth. But there's an argument that can be made, evidence being what
Miles has said, that its structure and style resist developers that are
"trained up" on modern techniques and development tools.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing[1] but it is a thing that exists and
is a force that should be recognized as we attempt to evaluate ways
to improve community engagement and support.
I think that TiddlyWiki can't be all things to all people. That's
the job of the tiddler.
[1] There's another argument to be made the modern development
techniques and communities are exclusionary priesthoods and
TiddlyWiki is a power to the people kind of thing, but if that's the
case then the need for a TiddlyWiki bible from which the people
might learn their power becomes a greater imperative than it already
is.
chris...@gmail.com
> I expect we're going to go off and write our own framework for
> single-page applications - because it sure looks a lot easier than
> buliding on Tiddly. That's sort of a shame.
around http://tiddlyspace.com/, looking at some of the non-tiddlywiki
applications that have been created there. Ben Gillies and Jon Robson
ought to be able to point out some good examples.
Ben Gillies
Hi Miles. As Chris states, we've been looking at and building
non-TiddlyWiki based apps on top of TiddlySpace for a while now.
There are some examples around TiddlySpace that you can look at:
* http://apps.tiddlyspace.com - This is a jumping off point for
several apps that Jon Robson (mostly) has written.
* http://tiddlyace.tiddlyspace.com - This app provides a simple code
editor witht the ability to create new HTML/JavaScript/CSS tiddlers,
etc (good for mocking up/developing around new apps). It's based on
the ACE project (https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace)
* http://tiddlybookmarks.tiddlyspace.com - This provides bookmarking
functionality that lets you save websites back to TiddlySpace (a bit
like Delicious). While the interface is currently TiddlyWiki based,
the bookmarklet is not, and is instead built using Twitter Bootstrap
(http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/)
If you're interested in developing on top of TiddlySpace (but outside
TiddlyWiki, then there are several things that might help you.
Standard frameworks like Backbone.js and Sammy.js should just work
(with some minor modifications to the syncing mechanisms to convert
models to tiddlers and send them to the right URIs, etc).
I've also been working on a new set of libraries, which I'm currently
calling TiddlyLib, that are designed to take advantage of both the
Tiddly way of doing things, and modern web development methods and
best practises. It's currently unfinished, but a few parts that are
involved are now quite stable and usable.
You can find out more information on TiddlyLib in the TiddlyLib space,
at http://tiddlylib.tiddlyspace.com, which I'm hoping to expand with
more info/docs/demos/etc soon.
Hope that's of some use
Ben
Tobias Beer
http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki/browse_frm/thread/7f5dd617af6f4c1f#
Cheers, Tobias.
iono...@gmail.com
Yakov
> Your table of content is just one example how subforums could be
> structured.
1) difficult to restructure and
2) need extensive and wise moderation
meaning
1) from time to time I understand that some chapters should be
shifted, merged, splitted etc. Like recently I understood that in
terms of consistent documentation the "user data structures" and
"macros" should be merged and in the future I also expect that
"navigation" and "workflow" chapters should be redivided into other
parts since they overlap already quite heavily. In forum, such
restructuring seems to be quite a problem each time.
2) a new or just not very advanced user will not know from time to
time where to post -- for instance, in the "user data structure"
section or in a "workflow" one. In this terms there should be some
moderators who will move threads here and there, and do it so that
thread creators won't lose their threads and understand why the thread
is moved, without hard feelings.
Perhaps I'm making things more complicated than they are, but this is
how I see it.
> extracting Google's TW threads and assign them to their fitting subforum.
thousands threads?
> Where I willingly would give a hand could be taking part in placing the threads in their proper subforum.
***
Chris,
> The hope, apparently not entirely well-founded, was that starting the
> migration would get the ball rolling and the community at large would
> do the rest. This didn't happen.
quite strange. When I rewrite some notes/texts I usually do start to
link them with others, understand more things, it provides further
"rolling". But when some documentation get moved by different people
from one place to another without any plan of its improvment, well..
it's even not clear what is rolling.
> A small number of people helped to migrate additional content beyond what I started.
> Very small number, relative to the number of people reading this group.
> To me that was evidence that the information was not considered relevant by the community.
something is moving somewhere. I don't understand what's happening, so
let the advanced members of community do the job properly"; and for
advanced users.. ok, I'm not sure about others but for me, despite the
fact that I tried to follow the threads about it, it looked like "we
have a bit messy documentation; anyway, let's move it to
TiddlySpace" (why? I haven't found a good reason) and then I haven't
understood is it possible to contribute and how, but neither I haven't
asked because I couldn't see a reason and a perspective in that move.
***
Now in conclusion I can suggest that any refactoring of old documents
or creation of new solid text should be at least led by sort of blog
(or forum, but not a forum which will contain final version of
information) where someone will post something like "Ok, guys, let's
focus on the styling chapter. [proposal of text structure] [some
materials, links] [some questions to be answered in the docs]". Then
-- some discussion, then -- some writings, then some conclusions and
afterward discussion. Without such "orginization" (or leading) I can't
see other ways to succeed. And it's not accidental that I mentioned
blog because such a "leading thing" must have some linear structure
and feeds (RSS/mail/whichever is convenient for community people) so
that everyone interested can follow.
chris...@gmail.com
> So, this was not about the TiddlySpace technology?
No, in the original thread that discussed the move the goal was to
move to a system that provided two features that tiddlywiki.org on
mediawiki did not have:
* resistance to spam
* using tiddlywiki for sake of tiddlywiki markup
wolfgang
Well, this google group is already the meeting place for this
community. And will remain if it isn't actively closed by those
responsible for it.
> The problem with forums I expect is that they are
> 1) difficult to restructure and
> 2) need extensive and wise moderation
simply is impossible!
Though I do almost know nothing about server-sides, but to set up a
forum, to moderate and shift threads I found easier than adjusting
TWs. It usually just works out of the box :-) (it's really that easy
as marking the thread with a checkbox and selecting the forum where to
move)
> moderators who will move threads here and there, and do it so that
> thread creators won't lose their threads and understand why the thread
> is moved, without hard feelings.
a note is left by default where it has been moved and for what reason
(for a predefined time). And if a few regular users would serve as
moderators something like moving a wrongly placed thread would have to
be done maybe once a week.
> This sounds incomprehensible. Are you talking about refactoring 55
> thousands threads?
a subforum and from there to their proper category from time to time.
Its that many posts only, and with a few threads like this one with
already more than 50 posts alone it's much, much less. Also because
the much better custom search of forum software, even non-categorized
it would be still easier to find things. Then just to categorize the
most recent 2 years its only about 10000 posts, which maybe amounts
2-3000 threads. Theoretical sorting 3 treads per day only - I alone
could do that in one year easily!
Yakov
google.group's successor, it should be better than it is (although,
this seems true only if there will be a "linear" representation of
threads still available -- to read the upcoming threads just for
answering/exploring new things -- and also there should be
possibilities to track comments on a specific thread). This is to be
considered as a good step without regard to the documentation
establishing.
> to moderate and shift threads I found easier than adjusting
> TWs. It usually just works out of the box :-) (it's really that easy
> as marking the thread with a checkbox and selecting the forum where to
> move)
splitted (say, first we have a "plugins" subforum and then we
understand that it should be splitted into repositories' section,
discussions of specific plugins, desire box etc), it is quite
effortful to proceed the split as we have all the old threads not
sorted and some of them even wouldn't be sortable as they correspond
to two or more subforums simultaneously (this is what I really don't
like about forums and like about TW -- you don't have to follow the
tree structure).
But once again, it seems that there is some point in replacing the
group with a forum (easier way to search old threads).
Miles Fidelman
> But once again, it seems that there is some point in replacing the
> group with a forum (easier way to search old threads).
I'd suggest hosting one's own email list - install mailman or sympa on
tiddlywiki.org. There are pretty good archiving options for both of them.
Miles Fidelman
Thanks for the pointers, but they sort of reinforce that it seems less
work to build from scratch.....
Ben Gillies wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 4:33 PM, cd...@peermore.com
> <chris...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Nov 13, 7:26 pm, Miles Fidelman<mfidel...@meetinghouse.net> wrote:
>>> I expect we're going to go off and write our own framework for
>>> single-page applications - because it sure looks a lot easier than
>>> buliding on Tiddly. That's sort of a shame.
>> If you're into tiddlers, but not TiddlyWiki, you might have a browse
>> around http://tiddlyspace.com/, looking at some of the non-tiddlywiki
>> applications that have been created there. Ben Gillies and Jon Robson
>> ought to be able to point out some good examples.
First off - we're specifically into SPAs that can run locally - that's
the primary attraction of TiddlyWiki. There are LOTS of ways to write
hosted applications.
If we WERE interested in building on tiddlyspace:
> Hi Miles. As Chris states, we've been looking at and building
> non-TiddlyWiki based apps on top of TiddlySpace for a while now.
>
> There are some examples around TiddlySpace that you can look at:
>
> * http://apps.tiddlyspace.com - This is a jumping off point for
> several apps that Jon Robson (mostly) has written.
absolutely no documentation behind any of those
>
> * http://tiddlyace.tiddlyspace.com - This app provides a simple code
> editor witht the ability to create new HTML/JavaScript/CSS tiddlers,
> etc (good for mocking up/developing around new apps). It's based on
> the ACE project (https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace)
Again, no documentation or anything to give a clue what this thing is.
We keep coming back to the same conclusions:
- TiddlyWiki is a great example of what's possible for with SPAs
- it's pretty useful in it's current form (though the changing
browser/landscape seems to lead to compatibility issues)
- it's virtually impossible to understand what's going on under the hood
without completely deconstructing the raw code - hence providing an
incredibly steep learning curve for even making small modifications,
much less using it as a platform
- hence, it's better as an existence proof, and a source of ideas - but
it's easier to redesign from scratch to get to a useful platform
Miles
Ben Gillies
> Thanks for the pointers, but they sort of reinforce that it seems less work to build from scratch.....
All of those examples are plain HTML and JavaScript so other than the reliance on the TiddlySpace server for persisting data they pretty much _are_ built from scratch.
> First off - we're specifically into SPAs that can run locally - that's the primary attraction of TiddlyWiki. There are LOTS of ways to write hosted applications.
Sure. The point of these apps is that they make use of TiddlySpace, not that they run from a file:/// URI. Some of them do work offline, but that's because of localStorage and cache manifests rather than TiddlyWiki.
>> * http://apps.tiddlyspace.com - This is a jumping off point for
>> several apps that Jon Robson (mostly) has written.
>
>
> absolutely no documentation behind any of those
That's true. I mentioned them more as an example of SPAs that have been written on TiddlySpace without using TiddlyWiki.
>> * http://tiddlyace.tiddlyspace.com - This app provides a simple code
>> editor witht the ability to create new HTML/JavaScript/CSS tiddlers,
>> etc (good for mocking up/developing around new apps). It's based on
>> the ACE project (https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace)
>
>
> Again, no documentation or anything to give a clue what this thing is.
Same with this one.
> - it's virtually impossible to understand what's going on under the hood without completely deconstructing the raw code - hence providing an incredibly steep learning curve for even making small modifications, much less using it as a platform
All of those examples are plain HTML and JavaScript built in much the same way as any other SPA is today. There really is nothing going on under the hood with them (indeed that's sort of the point).
> - hence, it's better as an existence proof, and a source of ideas - but it's easier to redesign from scratch to get to a useful platform
How "from scratch" do you mean here? TiddlySpace provides a backend server that you can write SPAs on in JavaScript "from scratch". As long as you follow the RESTful API, you can use whatever (e.g. Backbone) you want.
On the other hand, if by "from scratch" you mean something like Rails or Django, then yes, depending on what you're building, that may be a better fit.
Ben
chris...@gmail.com
> - hence, it's better as an existence proof, and a source of ideas - but it's
> easier to redesign from scratch to get to a useful platform
This is the case with about 95% of the open source out there in the
world, and is not necessarily a bad thing. If everything was already
perfect there would be no evolution and innovation, perhaps?
Which is not to excuse the current state of affairs, nor to explain
it, but rather to just indicate that it is fairly normal and there's
no catastrophe in progress here.
Miles Fidelman
> > - it's virtually impossible to understand what's going on under the
> hood without completely deconstructing the raw code - hence providing
> an incredibly steep learning curve for even making small
> modifications, much less using it as a platform
>
> All of those examples are plain HTML and JavaScript built in much the
> same way as any other SPA is today. There really is nothing going on
> under the hood with them (indeed that's sort of the point).
>
> > - hence, it's better as an existence proof, and a source of ideas -
> but it's easier to redesign from scratch to get to a useful platform
>
> How "from scratch" do you mean here? TiddlySpace provides a backend
> server that you can write SPAs on in JavaScript "from scratch". As
> long as you follow the RESTful API, you can use whatever (e.g.
> Backbone) you want.
>
I'm not quite sure why you keep going back to TiddlySpace. What makes
TiddlyWiki so special is the model of a "wiki in a single file" or "wiki
on a stick." Complete with themeing, code updating and a plug-in
architecture. That's the beginning of a serious platform.
If you look at a server-side equivalent - something like WikiMedia, or
Drupal, or WordPress, or perhaps CouchDB, or eXist - the systems have
clear, and clearly documented architectures - it's pretty clear how to
write a new theme, write a new module, access various APIs, write an
application on top of the platform, etc.
That's pretty much missing for TiddlyWiki - and it's a real obstacle to
anyone who'd actually like to use or extend the platform.
to which chris...@gmail.com wrote:
> This is the case with about 95% of the open source out there in the
> world, and is not necessarily a bad thing. If everything was already
> perfect there would be no evolution and innovation, perhaps?
> Which is not to excuse the current state of affairs, nor to explain
> it, but rather to just indicate that it is fairly normal and there's
> no catastrophe in progress here.
Keep in mind that this is a thread on the BUSINESS side of TiddlyWiki -
starting from Eric's statement about finding a way to get paid for some
of his TiddlyWiki work, and then Jeremy's posts about going out on his
own and focusing on "making TiddlyWiki good."
My comments have been offered as feedback in the context of open source
business models - what it takes for a Drupal or CouchDB to survive and
thrive as a platform, complete with a model for supporting a core group
of developers, and a model for attracting and maintaining a larger
development and user community - and what needs to happen for TiddlyWiki
to move into that league.
IMHO, Tiddly has (or at least had) the potential to become a pretty
serious platform, for a wide range of stand-alone, single page
applications. A lot of my comments have been motivated by working on a
project where I would really like to have used TiddlyWiki as a jumping
off point � and just finding too many obstacles in the way - leading to
our conclusion that we're probably better off going our own way (if our
project gets funded for Phase II).
Miles Fidelman
Miles Fidelman
>
> Keep in mind that this is a thread on the BUSINESS side of TiddlyWiki
> - starting from Eric's statement about finding a way to get paid for
> some of his TiddlyWiki work, and then Jeremy's posts about going out
> on his own and focusing on "making TiddlyWiki good."
>
> My comments have been offered as feedback in the context of open
> source business models - what it takes for a Drupal or CouchDB to
> survive and thrive as a platform, complete with a model for supporting
> a core group of developers, and a model for attracting and maintaining
> a larger development and user community - and what needs to happen for
> TiddlyWiki to move into that league.
>
> IMHO, Tiddly has (or at least had) the potential to become a pretty
> serious platform, for a wide range of stand-alone, single page
> applications. A lot of my comments have been motivated by working on a
> project where I would really like to have used TiddlyWiki as a jumping
> off point � and just finding too many obstacles in the way - leading
> to our conclusion that we're probably better off going our own way (if
> our project gets funded for Phase II).
I probably should add: What's really somewhat disappointing is that
Osmosoft, purports to be "a small team of developers at BT
<http://bt.com> who primarily make Web based collaboration tools
<javascript:;>. These tools are used by Osmosoft in products
<javascript:;> developed for BT, and in engagements <javascript:;> with
BT customers and independent organizations."
Small team, in a bigger enterprise, with business needs driving a piece
of software � that's been a pretty good recipe for launching an open
source project with long-term "legs" (e.g., Postfix, Zope, Erlang).
(The other environment that tends to generate open source projects with
long-term viability is academia - e.g., Apache's origins as the NCSA web
daemon, Mozilla, Sendmail.
Ben Gillies
You wrote:
> I expect we're going to go off and write our own framework for
> single-page applications - because it sure looks a lot easier than
> buliding on Tiddly. That's sort of a shame.
To which cdent mentioned that non-TiddlyWiki stuff is still possible
within (something like) TiddlySpace:
> If you're into tiddlers, but not TiddlyWiki, you might have a browse
> around http://tiddlyspace.com/, looking at some of the non-tiddlywiki
> applications that have been created there. Ben Gillies and Jon Robson
> ought to be able to point out some good examples.
To which I replied with some examples from TiddlySpace (hence why they
all mention TiddlySpace). If the bit you're interested in is
TiddlyWiki as an offline, single page wiki, and not tiddlers in
general, then none of what I've said is likely to have been of much
use to you. That's fine.
> If you look at a server-side equivalent - something like WikiMedia, or
> Drupal, or WordPress, or perhaps CouchDB, or eXist - the systems have clear,
> and clearly documented architectures - it's pretty clear how to write a new
> theme, write a new module, access various APIs, write an application on top
> of the platform, etc.
>
> That's pretty much missing for TiddlyWiki - and it's a real obstacle to
> anyone who'd actually like to use or extend the platform.
Yep. I don't think anyone here disagrees with you on that point.
Jeremy Ruston
* TiddlyWiki does indeed lack the level of documentation that one
would expect. Originally, TiddlyWiki itself was pretty small, and for
a long time I carefully maintained the idea of a good read-source
experience: that someone with a little experience of JavaScript could
reasonably expect to read through the source code in a weekend. As
TiddlyWiki has got more complex that read-the-source experience has
got less useful, and the lack of documentation is more painfully
apparent
* TiddlyWiki has suffered from a lack of impetus over the last few
years, in terms of keeping up with the changing browser landscape, or
taking advantage of new things like node.js
* Over the period that I was at Osmosoft we created TiddlyWeb and
TiddlySpace specifically to try to make something that would be useful
in BT, that would take the insights we've learned from TiddlyWiki and
apply them in a way that made sense in the enterprise. Accordingly, as
TiddlyWeb and TiddlySpace have matured, the lion's share of Osmosoft's
attention shifted to them
* My business plan is to try to have a handful of consultancy clients
that pay for half my time, so that I can work on open source in the
other half -- and thus get more interesting consultancy opportunities.
* My open source focus is going to be TiddlyWiki. As I've said, I'm
currently working on two basic things: the documentation and
experience of tiddlywiki.com, and updating the build tools. Then I
intend to pursue the ideas for a next generation TiddlyWiki that I
last explored in TiddlyWiki5.
* I liked Alex's book idea; it is something I've discussed with Eric
over the years, too. At the moment, I'm acutely conscious that I'm
barely keeping up with the writing that I need to do around
tiddlywiki's documentation, and think I might struggle with a big
project like a book. I wonder if it would be possible to fund the
writing of the book through Kickstarter?
* I don't think we need to replace or close the Google Groups. It
takes human effort to transform the transcript of a conversation into
useful, reusable content. One way to improve things might be for the
regular contributors to the group to adopt an etiquette of writing the
answers to questions on tiddlywiki.org directly, and point to those
answers from the Google Groups thread.
* It's for Matt and others at Osmosoft to say, but I suspect that me
picking up the reins with TiddlyWiki will be a welcome opportunity for
them to focus whole-heartedly on TiddlyWeb and TiddlySpace.
Miles, and everyone else, I really appreciate your perspective, and
thank you for your willingness to engage in this dialogue.
Best wishes
Jeremy
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Jeremy Ruston
mailto:jer...@osmosoft.com
http://www.tiddlywiki.com
Alex Hough
I think this is a good idea to explore. I wonder if a professional
technical writer might be employed by the funders to edit / draw
together materials. It would be a shame to divert Jerm's and ELS's
attention from TW
In some was the organisational activity of producing a book about
TiddlyWiki may help resolve other organizational issues which when
combined with TW technicalities have stalled in the past.
Alex
Yakov
> regular contributors to the group to adopt an etiquette of writing the
> answers to questions on tiddlywiki.org directly, and point to those
> answers from the Google Groups thread.
Anyway, can someone describe how to contribute in TiddlySpace?
I think this is essential and according to the concept, should be
written to tiddlywiki.org now (the link should be right near the
"welcome" link on the top), despite the fact that it's rather about
TiddlySpace than TiddlyWiki.
Besides, the idea seems to be quite good -- at least it implements
cumulativity right away. Although, the bigger the tiddlywiki.org
becomes, the longer it should take to load it (as I understand); and
for real cumulativity the space should be organized from time to time
(I mean, tiddlers with aspects in vacuum, with only the tag cloud and
search to navigate is quite bad at least for consistent reading, there
should be sort of table of contents).
TonyM
and Happy season Eric.
Regards Tony
Alex Hough
* I liked Alex's book idea; it is something I've discussed with Eric
over the years, too. At the moment, I'm acutely conscious that I'm
barely keeping up with the writing that I need to do around
tiddlywiki's documentation, and think I might struggle with a big
project like a book. I wonder if it would be possible to fund the
writing of the book through Kickstarter?
Jeremy Ruston
This is a very exciting idea. I guess the big question is who is
actually going to be the principal writer or editor of the work. My
focus has got to be ongoing development work, and so it can't be me.
But I'm in a good position to provide help and support to the main
author, and of course can help track down definitive answers about the
code.
Cheers
Jeremy
Alex Hough
The link doesn't work for me now ;) I'll investigate.... Kickstarter might be examining the proposal. I submitted it in MTC style, but there might some regulations they enforce.
WRT principal editor: all suggestions are welcome. It *is* a big question ... and an interesting one to the world of organization theorists as well as TW fans.
I think the key point is that there has to be some payment involved so that proper chunks of time from day jobs can allocated to the task.
I wonder if anyone interested in payed work might want to contact me off list with some idea of the kind day rates they would require to lend their full attention to the project.
There also could be a business model where contributors gain a share if the IP and future sales.
Suggestions?
best wishes
ALex
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Alex Hough
Kickstarter, apart from only accepting US based projects, also has a policy on the nature of the projects it allows on its platforms. The projects have to be "creative." I was not aware of this when I wrote the plan, and presented it as a documentation project. I can see how this might appear to be non-creative, but there is a widely held view that creativity can thrive in almost any context.
Bauwe, Mario and I had a text Skype chat on monday. I propose that we do it again next monday.
Anyone else interested, i guess, is welcome to join (providing Mario and Bauwe have no objections (and if the are up for the idea in the first place))
Alex