Seeking general feedback on Grok TiddlyWiki

[Soren Bjornstad]

Hi everyone,

I know quite a few people on here have been reading at least some of my book Grok TiddlyWiki. While I've gotten quite a bit of specific feedback submitted through the built-in feedback mechanism, I've been coming up short on overall impressions and significance beyond "thanks so much for this book." If you've looked at the book and you have a few moments, I'd love to know what you think. For instance:

• Is the book organized effectively?
• What parts have you read/worked through?
• How have you been using the book? Have you done some of the exercises and flashcards? Do they work? (I'm particularly interested in this question because I'd love to iterate and build more resources like this one in the future.)
• How have your TiddlyWiki skills improved, if they have?
• Any other thoughts?

If there's anything you don't want to share publicly, feel free to email it directly to me at contact (at) sorenbjornstad.com.

Much appreciated,

Soren

[Brian Radspinner]

To start: I don't have any coding background. I've been using TiddlyWiki on-and-off for a few years with Classic and TW5 from a fairly strict end-user perspective while only messing with stylesheets and others' plugins. Over the last year I've started trying to understand more of the program beyond just entering and organizing notes: using filters and macros to customize how tiddlers' information is displayed.

Is the book organized effectively?

I think it is. The book was easy to get an overview of when I started and was comfortable to work through and feel like I was building steadily on the information. I can't speak for a complete TW noob, and I''m glad to have started getting under the hood on my own before the book was released so that most of the concepts were not foreign to me.

What parts have you read/worked through?

I've followed along through Chapter 7. Javascript macros and Node.js is above my ability, and my needs, at this point. This includes the text, exercises, and take-aways.

How have you been using the book?

I read the book through from the start and followed along with an empty wiki to work through the exercises. After finishing as far as I wanted, I started trying to expand on your creation to start adding additional customization for practice.I would also experiment with my normal working wiki to incorporate some of the content (your simple take on the bi-directional links was an example that was added and tweaked for my own wiki).

Have you done some of the exercises and flashcards? Do they work?

I've through all the chapter exercises and some of the Supplemental exercises. I was reviewing with the Take-aways for a few weeks regularly. I do believe they have helped to cement some ideas for me.

How have your TiddlyWiki skills improved, if they have?

I'm now much more comfortable diving into the Tiddlywiki.com documentation for widgets and filter operators after going through the book. I've been able to start solving my own problems and have more of a chance to wrap my head around some of the problems others have presented in this forum. I've started building some of my own customizations to get what I want done instead of just hoping I can find someone else's version online already made.

Any other thoughts?

I'm currently working on my own Project Manager (some inspiration has come from the Projectify project) as a way to put more of the book's teaching in practice. It may not ever reach a publishable state, but I'm making something that I can see myself using regularly. I would not be able to have gotten this far without the knowledge gained from working through a structured book with concrete knowledge and practical examples to follow along with.

[TW Tones]

Soren,

I have not used it much yet as I am already a super user so possibly not in the target audience. Although I am sure I can learn a lot from it, why it may be good for less expert users is its "narrative quality", which may not help me. 

Users of you manual  can read through the story relating to different subjects getting a comprehensive introduction and hanging all the pieces together. I think this is fantastic.

Perhaps most valuable to me is being able to delegate some support to new users to your manual, where they can take time and learn rather than me writing new lessons to explain. As a result I still need to get to know it well.

• However from my super user perspective it is not so easy to stick with the story to find the Easter eggs in a lot of sections and search is somewhat overwhelmed by amount of content.
• There are however subject areas where I may as well be a new user and I am likely to get the full benefit, yet they do not (yet?) go into the detail I now need.
• What is critical here is I think it is very well done and appropriate for a broad audience, perhaps it is I that have outgrown some of its focus, I do not think it needs to be modified for people like me.
• At most, perhaps in future it could have some index or additional notes that lead the more advanced user to other resources.

Thanks so much for this substantial contribution to the Community

Regards

Tones

[springer]

Soren,

I think I'm part of the target audience for Grok TiddlyWiki, despite being a long-time user. I have never given myself a systematic approach, and have instead always learned whatever bits I need to solve this or that problem-at-hand. I'm grateful for your learning tool, and am slowly working through it (systematically including nearly all exercises through Chapter Four, with skimming and selective reading past that, as I've had less time to devote recently). 

The organization seems helpful to me, though like many dabblers I have depth in some areas you call "advanced" and deficits in some basics. A few early portions feel too elementary for me, but I've worked through them anyway, partly to make sure I absorb technical terminology better (where I know how to do X but not what the ingredients are called), and partly because I am frequently surprised, even in early chapters, by what Tones calls the occasional "easter egg" of discovering a new thing.

I did have one frustrating rabbit-hole experience with the RubberDucking exercise, but it was anomalous (I was working on a clone of your book, which contained an error you have since fixed. On my version, you hadn't yet compensated for how you tucked various components into shadows. I "fixed" the exercise filter's punctuation correctly, but it still showed nothing. My Rubber Duck was not at all helpful until it suggested that I dial up the book at your url, where "Eureka!" the actual exercise prompt was different. I could email you the details, but it's not of general interest.)

I'm pretty sure my skills are improving, especially if I think half of a skill is having the right *concepts* for one's skills, and a cogent understanding of their scope and limits.

One thing I specifically appreciate is that a search for "boolean" on your book brought me to a helpful discussion. I had tried in vain to find "boolean" on tiddlywiki.com (where it appears only incidentally around "then" and else") and on https://tobibeer.github.io/tw/filters/  ... (Not getting any helpful hits at these two spots did make me feel pretty crazy!) Finding a direct discussion of how boolean operations need to be approached, for filters, is the kind of thing many users might appreciate. (Note: I'd add words like "conjunction" and "disjunction" to your discussion, to aid searchability. The word "or" is of course unhelpfully too short -- with too many false positives -- for those who bring logical concepts to TiddlyWiki but aren't yet oriented to its operators.)

-Springer

[Paul Hampshire]

Soren,

Thank you for building Grok TiddlyWiki. I'm what I would call a long term novice in that I've used TiddlyWiki for a while but only in the past few months have I learned what it can truly do. That is in large part to this group and Grok TiddlyWiki.  I don't have a programming background and only have limited html experience so many of the explanations have been hugely helpful. I have found I have had two reoccurring hurdles that make my learning slower.

1. No matter what I do and what I've searched for has been able to explain why some things render differently for me. This has often caused me to stop and spend large quantities of time trying to figure out what is wrong. For example. In no version of TiddlyWiki (or browser or operating system) that I've downloaded does Heading 2 render with an underline. Doesn't happen. Ever. But it does in Grok TiddlyWiki. Another example that took me a ton of time to figure out was I had hidden carriage returns mucking things up. This happened because I was copy and pasting back and forth between programs. No where in any of my reading have I come across an article called "Top 10 dumb things you don't know to look for that will screw up what you're trying to do". BTW, an article on where spaces are ignored and where they break things and why would be AMAZING.

2. As a person new to this stuff, while I'm eternally grateful for what you and this community continues to do to help others understand, what might be another way to reach the non-programmers is a guide or introduction on how to read the documentation, a short and simple "idiots guide" so to speak. To use another expression it would be another way to "teach us to fish". I completely get that's exactly what you are trying to do with Grok TiddlyWiki and it has helped me immensely. BUT every time I go into the documentation my eyes cross. I know the answers are there but I don't know all the right words to look for to figure things out or how to read what's there. Again, Grok TiddlyWiki has helped me a lot, and everyone here is great about answering questions, but I know I can't be alone in that I hate the idea of asking a question when there is the documentation and Grok TiddlyWiki and I still can't figure something out. I'm in the stuff for a couple hours with a feeling similar to a word being on the tip your tongue but you can't figure it out. Hours of reading thinking I must be missing something simple it's got to be in here somewhere. I am 100% confident you and some of the others here could do a how-to for reading the documentation in a page or two, but it's that bridging the language gap that I'm certain is slowing many of us down. 

v/r,

Paul

[Soren Bjornstad]

Paul,

1. No matter what I do and what I've searched for has been able to explain why some things render differently for me. This has often caused me to stop and spend large quantities of time trying to figure out what is wrong. For example. In no version of TiddlyWiki (or browser or operating system) that I've downloaded does Heading 2 render with an underline. Doesn't happen. Ever. But it does in Grok TiddlyWiki. 

Ah! This is just because Grok TiddlyWiki has custom CSS rules that make some things look different. In $:/sib/Stylesheet, you'll find:

/* Add more horizontal space and a border for headings, except the title. */

h2:not(.tc-title) {

  /*margin-top: 6ex; -- for some bizarre reason Firefox and Chrome are calculating ex-height differently, so eyeballed an appropriate number of inches*/

  margin-top: 0.4in;

  padding-bottom: 5px;

  border-bottom: 0.05px solid <<color foreground>>;

}

Are you able to give some more examples of this? You're not the first person who's been confused by the fact that Grok TiddlyWiki doesn't look exactly like a stock TiddlyWiki because I've configured it differently. Maybe I need to point that out somewhere.

 

BTW, an article on where spaces are ignored and where they break things and why would be AMAZING.

Does block mode and inline mode help at all? That's specifically about carriage returns, but those are usually more confusing than actual spaces in my experience.

[Soren Bjornstad]

Also, my comment should definitely say “vertical space,” not “horizontal space,” haha.

[Paul Hampshire]

Soren,

Thanks for responding so fast!

When I have more time I'll have to look for other rendering differences, but the short answer is in hind-sight I now understand how custom CSS could do everything I was seeing. Unfortunately, it didn't occur to me that you'd used custom CSS to alter how the wikitext markup renders. My first instinct was that something was wrong on my end because I was/am the learner. And honestly now I'll go back and look at your stylesheet because I do like it. Maybe a simple warning up front for people to not worry about it.

Yes, your tiddler on "Block Mode and Inline Mode" did help me have an "ah ha!" moment in understanding how TiddlyWiki works. I do try to stick to only using wikitext whenever I can even in tables with the exception of <br>. The simpler I can keep things when things don't work it's less for me to trouble shoot. I discovered the CodeMirror editor plugin for adding line numbers to tiddlers in edit mode and that has help a ton, and I'm using Notepad++ for the same reason when formatting larger blocks of text at once.

But I'm still confused as to what the differences are in how things behave in different places. For example back to my spacing issues general input in a tiddler in edit mode versus in a custom field. From what I've read it makes it seem like they should behave the same but they don't. Again some of the most basic things spaces and carriage returns. In tiddler edit mode spaces are sometimes ignored and carriage returns by default can hide and break things, but if I paste text into a custom field it seems to ignore carriage returns. But they are both supposed to be just text fields so shouldn't they behave the same? It's things like these that make me perpetually think there is something possibly very basic I'm missing or not understanding. 

[TW Tones]

Springer,

The text field is using a textarea definition and other field just text. You can have what we often call multi-line fields, however if you use the built in field editor in the edit template you will break the line feeds.

If that is what you are after consider raising a new thread.

Tones

[Mohammad]

Hi Soren,

 While I have already sent you several comments! I like to answer your request here!

 1. I have a local copy of your Grok Tiddlywiki and it is in my quick shortcut list and I see it time by time specially when there is question I am looking for a solution

 2. I think Grok has been written in a fluent technical language and many can benefit by reading and practicing with its interactive exercises

 3. Grok itself is a Tiddlywiki edition and has many interesting  design feature, one can learn  

4. I did not do all exercises, but I tried some of them to see how they work

I did not read the book thoroughly, for me it is a lengthy with long and extra explanations, but for newbies this may help better understanding!

• So, in general, this is a unique piece of work and I hope to see new Revision (Edition)
• I would recommend in new editions cover new TW features (e.g 5.2.x) and drop old ones

Good luck

Mohammad

[TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao Soren,

I think I GROK Grok TiddlyWiki quite well  :-)

I mentioned elsewhere that I think it might be quite useful if you provided some kind of downloadable macro with an embedded SVG of your site logo for dev. users to use to cross-link to it.

WHY? Because it is a great resource that deserves a unique "BADGE LINK" any dev could use to refer to specific Tiddlers in your wiki.

I also think TW.com deserves the same, but very little else.

Learning tools need INGRESS POINTS that are clearly flaggable from other web pages to get the inter-connections good learning needs.

Just a somewhat opinionated take! :-)

Not far off the truth, I think.

Good luck to Grok and all who sail with her!

TT