My 'perfect.system' just got much more perfecter-ish

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David Gifford

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Jan 9, 2016, 1:34:40 PM1/9/16
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Hi all

I knew I should have played around a bit more before posting about 'perfect.system.'

Last night and this morning I had eureka moments and greatly refined my system. It is now way easier to use and does things that would have been next to impossible in the first zip file.

Imagine a system that allows you to link and create tiddlers between numerous TWs almost as easily as internal links in a single TiddlyWiki, with no node.js, and something you can upload to your site if you wish. A system that lets you find and edit any tiddler quickly.

Here is the link to perfect.system, a zip file with three folders and 41 TW files (5.1.10). http://www.giffmex.org/experiments/perfect.system.1.09.16.zip.  I was enthused last weekend with the original idea. I am ecstatic about this. I think I practically just created my own personal substitute for wikipedia...

Maybe I am overstating my case, you decide. Please try it out and give me some feedback.

Dave

Dave

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Jan 9, 2016, 10:23:42 PM1/9/16
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Looks interesting!  You know what would be helpful? a screencast of you using the system.  E.g. It took me a while to figure out that the starting tiddler was hidden (at least in linux a file that starts with a "." is automatically hidden). 

Would you use this system for everything?  Research, brainstorming, presentation TWs...?  Some widely ranging examples in a screencast showing the actual work flow of things would be ideal.

Regardless, I'll try it out over the weekend and get back to you if I have any questions (or praises ;) )

Dave

David Gifford

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Jan 9, 2016, 10:35:51 PM1/9/16
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Hi Dave

Yeah, I was thinking of that, May be a while before I can, as I would have to refresh myself on how to do that.

Dave

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David Gifford
Christian Reformed World Missions, Mexico City

Tobias Beer

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Jan 10, 2016, 5:01:39 AM1/10/16
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Hi David,

Surely, what you are handling here
is possibly what many users are facing:

What to do if one wiki ain't going to cut it?

May I ask:

(Why) Did you decide against putting all your wikis in the same folder?

It appears that would make cross-referencing a whole lot easier,
since we skip any traversing of folders up and down.

the thing is, without node, the only way to reference wikis is by using relative or absolute paths.
Using node, you can include wikis in whichever way you want, wherever they are located...
but then, of course, you sure end up with all those tiddlers
in one (temporarily constructed) / project specific wiki.

While an interesting approach to put all tiddlers into alphabetically separated wikis,
don't you want to use TiddlyWiki for aggregated lists?
And how are you going to do that if those tiddlers are spread accross wikis
...without including a bunch of editions into an aggregated wiki under node?

I think I would go with a tiddler-prefix method with topic-related wikis
than wikis per letter of the alphabet.

Have you looked at how:


...is created?

I'm simply including a bunch of other plugin wikis containing their documentation:


...where my plugin documentation tiddlers are all prefixed with:

<plugin-name>-DocTiddlerTitle

...and then add some meta-tiddlers, e.g. for examples using two plugins
to the plugins edition.... well, under node.

All I need to do is go to that folder and use some shortcuts to run

tiddlywiki --server

...and then type 12 into my address bar + DOWN + ENTER
to open http://127.0.0.1:8080 in my browser.
All that truly is not as scary or techy as you might think.

Best wishes,

Tobias.

David Gifford

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Jan 10, 2016, 9:56:59 AM1/10/16
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Good morning Tobias, good question.

I put all my main TWs in the outer folder to keep things simpler for cross referencing.

I put all the images in another folder, so that when I save an image from the web, or want to know where a photo is, I know it will be in the 'i' folder.

I put all the other documents in another folder to treat them as separate from the main TWs - the other documents are source documents from which to write articles and take notes in this system.

The projects I suppose could have been placed in the outer folder, but it made sense to me to keep them conceptually distinct. Projects are big TWs for my classes with everything I have on, say, the Gospel of Luke, whereas the TWs with letters and numbers are for the loose stuff - topics I don't plan to have a lot of notes on, but that I want to save ideas for when I run across them.

I may change my mind about that, just to make the relative paths easier to manage. But probably not, because I put projects in a separate folder is that I don't plan to create more than one general link to each project. If I want to save something on Luke, I open the index, search 'Luke', open the link, and in the Luke folder I find where to place it. The index won't contain links to every little detail in the projects as they will to the lettered and numbered TWs.

Hope that helps.

Dave



On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 4:01 AM, Tobias Beer <beert...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi David,

Surely, what you are handling here
is possibly what many users are facing:

What to do if one wiki ain't going to cut it?

May I ask:

(Why) Did you decide against putting all your wikis in the same folder.

It appears that would make cross-referencing a whole lot easier,
since we skip any traversing of folders up and down.

Best wishes,

Tobias.

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David Gifford

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Jan 10, 2016, 10:29:33 AM1/10/16
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Hi Dave, I realize now that I didn't answer your main question. Sorry.

In my mind I have four uses for this system:

1. Gather everything in my computer in the index, as links, so that everything is accessible from one place. So my folders of images and documents are linked to from the index, as well as my work projects - TWs on topics where I gather larger amounts of info. Handy to say the least.

So yes, everything and every kind of thing, would be accessible, but not every little file would get a link, just folders, until I am working on a project and feel a link to this presentation or that TW is warranted.

2. Have a big version of a TiddlyWiki, where the majority of my topics hyperlink back and forth with each other, and get indexed in one central index. But in this case they link between multiple TWs rather than one, and get indexed in a central index. As Tobias wrote, when one wiki won't cut it.

3. As certain tiddlers get polished enough to share with others, I will export them as statics and publish or send by email.

4. Have an easy method of dumping and tagging deas as I find them in reading, browsing, philosophizing, etc. Open the index, search for the category in which to put the idea, create an external link in the index to a "letter" TW (if the idea is about the environment, I will make a link to an as yet uncreated tiddler in the E file), save and click the link, and create the tiddler there in the E file. If the tiddler already exists, I will just add the idea to the already existing tiddler. Long paragraph to describe it, but it is an easy process.

I should say that I came across this fourth function by going about it backwards. My original idea was to have any number of TWs organized by topic, and work on them as projects (thus the projects folder), and add tiddlers in each, and remember to link them from the index by grabbing the permalink of the new tiddlers. But then two things happened:

a) I was reading some great articles online at the Book of Life (http://www.thebookoflife.org/what-is-the-book-of-life/), and wanted to copy and paste items from them into my system, but found that I didn't have TWs for those topics. I would have to first create new TWs, then paste. Too much work for every new idea that comes along. I realized I needed something like my old Braintags classic TW, where I could just "dump and tag." So I came up with the idea of doing TWs with letters and numbers so that no matter what new idea came along, I could just add it to the appropiate letter or number (C for courage, 1 for the book 1984).

2) As I was playing with my letters and numbers idea, my only thought was to have them as somewhat isolated from and unrelated to each other, but with links to all of them from the index. But then I discovered how easy it was to hyperlink between them if I put them all in one folder. [ext[Courage|./c.html#Courage]] is really no harder than doing hyperlinks in Wikipedia / Mediawiki, and not much more effort, mentally, than doing an internal link in a TW. I could even create a bookmarklet to wrap a topic iwth the link markup to make it even easier. And even better, I realized that clicking the link from the index takes me not only to the other file but directly to the tiddler or potential tidder!

So rather than start with the files and remember to add a link in the index, I now can start with the index, create a link quickly, and add the idea in the proper place. And I need not fear overwriting an existing tiddler, since if it already exists, I will be taken to it. A much, much better process for me.

I hope that helps. Blessings

Dave

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 9:23 PM, Dave <ceda...@telus.net> wrote:

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Mat

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Jan 10, 2016, 10:57:20 AM1/10/16
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 @Dave

Please try it out and give me some feedback.

ATM I have too many tw things going on to try it out, but from what I read here I must absolutely insist that you demo this on some hangout. Please. Sounds very interesting.

<:-)

David Gifford

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Jan 10, 2016, 11:40:46 AM1/10/16
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okay as long as the hangouts are Tuesdays I should be able to do that, my classes are on Weds this semester

Dave

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Scott Simmons (Secret-HQ)

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Jan 11, 2016, 11:49:20 PM1/11/16
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On Sunday, January 10, 2016 at 9:56:59 AM UTC-5, David Gifford wrote:
 
The projects I suppose could have been placed in the outer folder, but it made sense to me to keep them conceptually distinct. Projects are big TWs for my classes with everything I have on, say, the Gospel of Luke, whereas the TWs with letters and numbers are for the loose stuff - topics I don't plan to have a lot of notes on, but that I want to save ideas for when I run across them.

For what it's worth, in my old/possibly retiring system, I created "loose" notes in my main TiddlyWiki, tagging as appropriately as I could on the fly.  When a tag started being use A LOT, I'd generally export those tiddlers to a separate TiddlyWiki.  I did end up with a pretty chunky main TW over time, but the periodic grooming helped. 
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