Just realized what was tripping me up with tags (I think it was the UI, thanks Soren!)

[Osin]

I'm a TW noob, I "know" about all these different TW pieces, but when it comes to putting it together and "thinking" in a TW manner, then putting something together, I tend to freeze up.

Tags are something fairly simple to grasp, but I didn't realize they needed more preparation, and how they fit in a hierarchy was a bit of a challenge (using them to create a TOC for example). I was lucky enough to have access to Soren's Grok TW, and tags representing "membership" made me click.

Then it occurred to me that visually, tag pills are smaller and are located right below the Title - something that is traditionally representative of a lower place in a hierarchy. I guess I was thinking about tags as amorphous keywords, kind of what you'd use to characterize music genres rather than them having the possibility of having an inherent hierarchy.

Does this make any sense or am I way off?

[Mat]

Interesting interpretations. 

Tags in TW can be whatever you want them to be. It is probably most common to use them for hierarcies and categories but it can really be arbitrary keywords. A cool aspect, which I guess we see in many other tools as well these days, is that tags can also be tiddlers, i.e the tag name can be a tiddler title.

To use them for ToC's then, yeah, I guess they have to be hierarchical, at least the way the core ToC macros are implemented.

If you are more convenient with having the tags above the title, to imply "higher order", you can reorder the tiddlers ViewTemplates (and the EditTemplates). Incidentally, this is most easily done via tags(!) i.e by opening the ViewTemplate tag and drag the tags template to where you want it positioned relative to the other parts of the tiddler.

How do you find the ViewTemplate tag, you ask. Either you locate a tiddler tagged such or you create a tag and use it, like so 

<<tag "$:/tags/ViewTemplate">>

...or you support my proposal for increased access to these things.

<:-)

[Osin]

"Tags in TW can be whatever you want them to be." (I don't know how to quote in Google groups).

I know! :) That statement is too broad for someone just starting out, though. It's like "everything is a tiddler" or "everything is a list". The lines get blurred really quickly and I'm second-guessing my decisions every step of the way.

The arbitrary "unstructured" keyword part is fairly easy to wrap one's head around, so are hierarchies, but for some reason I was struggling with the "tags as hierarchies" concept, and I think I understand why now. To be honest I don't think that having them above the title would make any more sense!

Just something I wanted to throw out there. Now, onto filters...

[jc-ose]

Lately, I've adopted a sort of multi-use method for utilizing tags, where I have two or three different sets of tags that all serve different purposes. I have a main set of tags the are setup as a hierarchy (for organizing information linearly so it is easy to find), and then I have a different set of tags that I use for context (for non-linear linking of related information). I'm finding that I like that method, but I'm always evolving how I use TW!

For example:

Let's say you have the top-level tags 'Food' and 'Recipes'. Then you have a tiddler named "Basmati Rice" tagged with 'Food' for organization and 'Rice' for context. You also have a tiddler named "Risotto" tagged with 'Recipes' for organization and 'Rice' for context. 

That makes it easy to find information on either Basmati Rice or Risotto, but it also links the two under the common context 'rice'. So if you just want to see topics related to 'rice' (even though rice is not one of your main topics), you can easily capture that information by clicking on the rice tag. 

Hopefully that makes some sense. 

[Soren Bjornstad]

jc-ose, I do this too and I think it's quite effective. I associate each tag role with a color and icon, too, so it's easy to tell them apart (and I've hacked the tag picker so that it sorts by color before title).

[jc-ose]

Yeah I also use tag color to differentiate the role. I never considered hacking the tag picker though, that's a really good idea! I'm going to try that out.