The proper way to keep a TiddlyWiki organized

[Rob Hoelz]

Hi there, fellow TiddlyWiki users!

First of all, to the devs: thanks for all the hard work you put into TiddlyWiki!  I've been happily using TiddlyWiki for a few months now as a way of gathering my thoughts, and it's a real joy to use.  The only problem is there's always another customization I want to make to make my life easier. =)

I'm wondering what the "proper" way to use a TiddlyWiki is.  You see, I store everything in my TiddlyWiki: coding project ideas, games I want to play, books I want to read, links and descriptions of projects I find interesting, etc.  The problem is that I'm nearing 2,000 tiddlers, and I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong.  So I have two questions:

• Should I have multiple TiddlyWikis, one for my reading list, one for my gaming list, etc etc?  This would probably help keep some things organized and make my search results within a single wiki more relevant, but then I can't really link between them.
• For something like a reading list - should I have a single tiddler with a list (or table) of all of the books I want to read, or should I have a tiddler per book?  A tiddler per book seems like overkill (and can really mess with my search results), but having a tiddler per book would allow me to use wikitext to create different views of my list, as well as write down my thoughts for each book in its tiddler if I so choose.

I'm sure there's no "wrong way" to use a TiddlyWiki, but I'm guessing it was written with a particular way of using it in mind, and I would rather go with the flow than fight the tool.  Thanks in advance for any insight you can offer, and thanks again for such a great tool!

-Rob

[Dragon Cotterill]

The "proper" way to organise your TWs is... whatever works for you.

There is no right or wrong way. It's whatever works for you. If your reading list needs to be separate tiddlers for each book for some, and a big long list for others then you can mix and match as you see fit.

I have a whole slew of TWs; some are full blown TWs with 1,000+ entries ( https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1207193/library.html ), others are small with just a few thoughts in them. And some have even been reduced to PureStore formats and are included in other TWs.

My Food and Recipe TW is stored separately from my Video index. However if you're in the Food one and you click the right link, then it imports all the video tiddlers related to food TV programmes into the Food TW, with all the appropriate embedded VLC objects to play the recipe.

Your reading list may cross into your gaming list at some point. Separate or together doesn't make much difference really.

[PMario]

On Thursday, July 28, 2016 at 9:41:28 PM UTC+2, Rob Hoelz wrote:

Hi there, fellow TiddlyWiki users!

Hi Rob,
 

I've been happily using TiddlyWiki for a few months now as a way of gathering my thoughts, and it's a real joy to use. 

That's great!
 

The only problem is there's always another customization I want to make to make my life easier. =)

Yea, that's the big problem at the beginning ;)

As Dragon wrote, there is no "single right way". It always depends on the user. So I can just tell you, what I found out is right for me :)

 - If I think, I need to have a new customization I implement it (plugin, css, or what ever)
 - but not more than 3 new things at a time. It turned out, that more is overwhelming
 - at the beginning I try to use the new stuff as often as possible. .. So I see, if it works with my workflow
   - If it works .. OK
   - If it steps on my toes, ... remove it
   - If it is "kind of ok" ... try it for 1 or 2 more week(s).
 - If I don't use a new functionality for more than one week ... remove it. I don't really need it.

That helps me, to keep the number of plugins down.

• Should I have multiple TiddlyWikis, one for my reading list, one for my gaming list, etc etc?  This would probably help keep some things organized and make my search results within a single wiki more relevant, but then I can't really link between them.

Several TWs work well for me.  ... I have pinned them in the browser toolbar, so they are always open.
 

• For something like a reading list - should I have a single tiddler with a list (or table) of all of the books I want to read, or should I have a tiddler per book? 

I use a single tiddler per item, because I like to have the possibility to create different lists depending on tags.
I need several iterations, till my tags work well. But if they do, it's really fast way to get a lot of different dynamically generated lists. Getting the tags right, is important for me. So from time to time, it happens, that all of them get re-organized. ... So my right sidebar "Recent" sorting needs to be changed to "created" instead of "modified" ...

just some thoughts.
have fun!
mario

[Xavier Cazin]

Hi Rob,

Continuing the "at least it works for me" thread, here is how I try ot organise my wikis:

1. I dump new tiddlers into the wiki as they come, without even trying to figure out a category
2. I maintain parallely a list of the tiddlers that have no tag (filter="[untagged[]]")
   
3. Whenever the list increases beyond 10 items, I try to figure at least one tag for those tiddlers, taken from the Table of Contents. So the ToC serves as a guide for tagging. If no entries of the ToC is relevant, then I create a new ToC entry, and use it to tag the tiddler.

On your second question, I'd go for making each item of your lists a separate tiddler. Not only it has the advantages that you are describing, but it also helps with tagging, since you typically want each item tiddler tagged with the name of the list tiddler: if it is relevant for you to maintain book lists titled "Fantasy" or "Wishlist" or even "Recommendations to the 3rd grade teacher on Forest & Trees", the three of them would make pertinent tags.

Doing that, you'll see that you don't need many wikis, except of course if their size make them slow, or you want to share part of your information and not the rest.

Best,

Xavier Cazin.

-- Xavier Cazin

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[Chuck R.]

Make sure each of your tiddlers has at least 2-3 tags, so you can find it again easily later. So for a specific video game, 2 tags might be: "game", "rpg".

[Rob Hoelz]

Thanks for all of the replies, everyone!  I had a feeling that "do whatever you want" was the TiddlyWiki way; that's a very familiar feeling as a Perl programmer. =)

I think I'll stick with one wiki for now, and I'll use individual tiddlers for each item.  TW makes it so easy to rearrange things and to move tiddlers between wikis, so I'm not worried about painting myself into a corner here.

Thanks again!