Bookmarks/Favorites

[Scott Simmons (Secret-HQ)]

Anyone using TiddlyWiki as a replacement for a Web browser's bookmarks/favorites?

In particular, I'm curious if anyone's cooked up a scheme for importing a bookmarks HTML/XML file to TiddlyWiki as tiddlers and/or exporting to tiddlers to such a file that could be imported back into the user's browser of choice.  (There will be differences based on browser, of course, but this seems like something SOME TiddlyWizard out there has tackled already.)

[Scott Simmons (Secret-HQ)]

Well, of course Dave Gifford has played around with the idea!  😉

http://giffmex.org/experiments/tidmarks.html

[Birthe C]

Hi Scott Simmons,

That would indeed be handy. I remember it discussed before, but I cannot remember having seen a solution.

For a long time I have used tiddlyclip to bookmark. I have it ask for a tag when I do so. The good part is, that in my wiki I can make comments to my tiddler (bookmark).

Birthe

[Jed Carty]

I made a bookmarks library too, but it may not be as good as Dave's.

https://ooktech.com/TiddlyWiki/Bookmarks/

I briefly looked at what would be necessary to be able to automatically add bookmarks to tiddlywiki and didn't get anywhere. From what I remember browser security restrictions made it annoying.

[TonyM]

Folks,

I think there is value in both Dave and Jeds solutions I have being wanting to improve Bookmark capture further. Here are some ideas I intended to play with

• If you select a URL in a browser address bar then click and drag you can drop it on a wiki and then import an Untitled tiddler containing both the URL and its descriptive name.
• Similarly a copy link address on any address in a browser a ctrly-v or paste on a current tiddlywiki will create a Untitled tiddler containing the URL for import.
• The same can be true on the local computer with links beginning "\\" eg \\host\folder\folder2 (dragged from windows File manager)
  

So I plan to build a process that identify tiddlers "dropped" or "pasted" whos text field begins http and provides a button to convert them to a bookmark with an appropriate tiddler title.

Something similar may be achievable with the new TiddlyClip as well.

Some food for thought

Regards

Tony

[David Gifford]

oooh that sounds cool!

[Jed Carty]

I hadn't considered the effects of just dropping the link onto a wiki. It is very easy to hook into the import mechanism and modify behaviour based on that, the mechanism is part of the core.

I think that the biggest things to decide would be to decide on how you want each entry to look and how you want to annotate the dropped link.

The two options that come to mind is making a generic link name for the tiddler, like Link N where N is a number that will make it not overwrite any existing tiddlers, or to open it up in a pre-filled input box where you can give it a title and tags and whatever else you want.

This sounds useful, I will see what I can put together later today if I have time and it is as simple as I think it is.

[TonyM]

Jed.

When it comes to drag and drop quite a bit could be done to the import process however tiddlywiki drag and drop features could also be used to create custom drop zones that use an alternate import process.

I imagined a custom tiddler with say 4 to 6 large table cells with an icon and background colour each. An alternate import process for each would provide different zones for example standard import, bookmark import, maintain json as a tiddler and drop imports with or without title prompts.

This tiddler could be displayed on the background when other tiddlers are closed.

Regards
Tony

[Joshua Fontany]

Good ideas!

I'm still hacking away at my JsonEditor / JsonUI project, but just before that I was experimenting with auto-importing Chrome/Firefox bookmarks directly from the sql database they live in (& also grabbing favicons from that sql db). Getting my rather LARGE bookmark collection into tiddlywiki is pretty high on my to-do list. Really like what I am hearing so far.

Best,
Joshua Fontany

[TonyM]

Joshua,

you can export bookmarks to bookmarks.html and drop that in. Its not ideal but quick but I like the approach you are investigating.

Tony

[Scott Simmons (Secret-HQ)]

Hi, Birthe —

Glad to see it's not just me who has some interest in this.  It's been a wish-list item for me for a while.  I'm hesitant whether ANY solution will be worth the pain-staking process of migrating my bookmarks out of my browser and into TiddlyWiki, but the idea of having a cross-browser set of local bookmarks where I can use multidimensional filtering to see details in all sorts of different arrangements is awfully appealing.

On Sunday, April 21, 2019 at 5:42:18 AM UTC-4, Birthe C wrote:

For a long time I have used tiddlyclip to bookmark. I have it ask for a tag when I do so. The good part is, that in my wiki I can make comments to my tiddler (bookmark).

I tried out TiddlyClip a while back but never spent much time with it.  I know some users are great fans of its abilities.

I'd like to give it another spin, but since I'm clueless about running TW under Node.js or BOB, I'm not sure how to get the latest version (@ GitHub) to work in the browser.  [No idea how to pluginify (?) it for that environment.]

I'd also a little reluctant to leverage another plugin that requires a browser plugin for my solution.  That may be one more dependency than I want to keep up with.

[Scott Simmons (Secret-HQ)]

On Sunday, April 21, 2019 at 6:11:54 AM UTC-4, Jed Carty wrote:

I made a bookmarks library too, but it may not be as good as Dave's.

https://ooktech.com/TiddlyWiki/Bookmarks/

That's awesome, Jed!  Looking back through my folders, I found an earlier version I'd cadged (from here maybe?) a while back.

I like the way you're using a custom ViewTemplate.  Custom ViewTemplate(s?) and EditTemplate(s?) are the direction I'm starting to think in.

 

I briefly looked at what would be necessary to be able to automatically add bookmarks to tiddlywiki and didn't get anywhere. From what I remember browser security restrictions made it annoying.

I can believe that.  TonyM's idea of a custom dropzone certainly is interesting.  I'd considered what happens when you drag a URL onto an open TiddlyWiki, but then I immdiately thought about what happens when you drag a TiddlyWiki URL onto an open TiddlyWiki and wondered what might happen with different file types/extensions.  I have no idea how to go about building a custom dropzone, but that seems like a great potential solution.

Especially if you can turn a bookmarks TiddlyWiki into a browser sidebar, where you can drag links onto a dropzone and bookmark without leaving the main window.  That would be super-cool.

[Scott Simmons (Secret-HQ)]

I concur with Dave.  These are some thrilling possibilities!

Regarding TiddlyClip, check out my comments here:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/tiddlywiki/1Z7kIaPF2Nk/RRpYwX-XAwAJ

Regarding custom dropzones, here's some more food for thought:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/tiddlywiki/1Z7kIaPF2Nk/1Unp_D6YAwAJ

[Scott Simmons (Secret-HQ)]

On Wednesday, April 24, 2019 at 1:12:39 PM UTC-4, Joshua Fontany wrote:

Getting my rather LARGE bookmark collection into tiddlywiki is pretty high on my to-do list. Really like what I am hearing so far.

I'm in the same boat — and yet STILL a bit reluctant to make the leap from keeping bookmarks in the browser to keeping them in a TiddlyWiki.  (The primary allure for me is in being able to sort and display bookmarks in all sorts of different ways using tags and custom templates.)

As an escape hatch, I'd love to have a TiddlyWiki mechnism for exporting a [browser-of-your-choice]-compliant .HTML file to move bookmarks back to the browser if you decide to do so in the future.  It should be possible to generate the body of the file with filters and macros then export it with some customizations to the export function.  (I think; I'm iffier on this second part, as I've never tried that.)

[Mark S.]

When I started working on Quinoid, I found I needed a way to track references

But of course, it doesn't interface with Firefox bookmarks.

I was thinking that it might be possible to write a processor in node.js that would convert a bookmarks.json file exported from FF into tid files that could be loaded into TW. Not having used node, I'm making assumptions about the ability to open/close files which might not be true. I thought of node because javascript already has JSON abilities built-in. And  most people using TW already have node installed somewhere.

-- Mark

[Scott Simmons (Secret-HQ)]

Thinking about this has raised a couple of other "How do I ... with TiddlyWiki?" questions.  I'm going to brain-dump them here in case anyone has quick answers or ideas:

1. How do I scrape/capture the <title> of a page by inputting a URL into a field?  Has anyone built a TW-friendly mechanism for this?
2. How do I write a filter to find all tiddlers with a specific tag — and no other tags?
• That second part is the tricky bit, at least for me.
  
3. I know there has been some traction on developing tiddler bundles, but is there a format for a file consisting of multiple .tids in a single file?
• That is, could I batch-convert an HTML file exported from a browser into a file of .TIDs and then import them without having to split that HTML into multiple files first?
4. How do I pass a variable into the <$list> widget of a tiddler that's transcluded in a tabset?
• I'm thiking about giving each "folder" tiddler (i.e., each tiddler that would correspond to a folder in a traditional bookmarks file) a set of tabs for displaying its children in different ways.  This would enable you to cycle through different views of the "contents" of a folder — sorted by creation date, sorted by tag, or what-have-you.
  Rather than create a tabset for each one of these tiddlers, I'd like them to reference a set of static tiddlers containing variables and then pass that variable to them.  Something like <$var foo="bar"><<tabs "tab1 tab2 tab3" ...>></$var> where tab1, tab2, and tab3 all have filters like <$list filter="[tag[$(foo)$]]">...</$list>.

[Mark S.]

#2 Example, perhaps

<$list filter="[tag[HelloThere]]" variable="testme">
<$list filter="[title<testme>tags[]count[]]" variable="count">
<$reveal type="match" default="1" text=<<count>>>
<<testme>>
</$reveal>
</$list>

[TonyM]

Scott,

Some incomplete responses below

On Monday, April 29, 2019 at 5:56:50 AM UTC+10, Scott Simmons (Secret-HQ) wrote:

Thinking about this has raised a couple of other "How do I ... with TiddlyWiki?" questions.  I'm going to brain-dump them here in case anyone has quick answers or ideas:

1. How do I scrape/capture the <title> of a page by inputting a URL into a field?  Has anyone built a TW-friendly mechanism for this?

This may be the most difficult Question to answer, yet sometimes when I drag a link to  tiddlywiki it drops the link Plus the text 

Perhaps there is a special active bookmark mechanism that can be used in the browser, I know some people have cramed automation into special browser bookmarks 

1. How do I write a filter to find all tiddlers with a specific tag — and no other tags?
• That second part is the tricky bit, at least for me.
  

One way is to compare the result of the filter tags with the field tags {{tags}} or in filters {tags}, or just ask if tags[tagname]  = fieldname[value] as tags containing one tiddler only is equal to the name of that tag

1. I know there has been some traction on developing tiddler bundles, but is there a format for a file consisting of multiple .tids in a single file?
• That is, could I batch-convert an HTML file exported from a browser into a file of .TIDs and then import them without having to split that HTML into multiple files first?

Marios bundler plugin is a worth while tool. I recommend using it. However exporting a json file from advanced search is multiple tiddlers in a single file. I think it's josua developing a sophisticate json editor and related tools you should look to for json file handling.

1. How do I pass a variable into the <$list> widget of a tiddler that's transcluded in a tabset?
• I'm thiking about giving each "folder" tiddler (i.e., each tiddler that would correspond to a folder in a traditional bookmarks file) a set of tabs for displaying its children in different ways.  This would enable you to cycle through different views of the "contents" of a folder — sorted by creation date, sorted by tag, or what-have-you.
  Rather than create a tabset for each one of these tiddlers, I'd like them to reference a set of static tiddlers containing variables and then pass that variable to them.  Something like <$var foo="bar"><<tabs "tab1 tab2 tab3" ...>></$var> where tab1, tab2, and tab3 all have filters like <$list filter="[tag[$(foo)$]]">...</$list>.

Using tabs you specify a template that can contain the above list statement and use `<<currentTab>>` rather than `<<currentTiddler>>` There are a number of ways to achieve what you want here.

Regards

Tony