Seeking reviewers for an upcoming TiddlyWiki textbook (both experts and beginners)

[Soren Bjornstad]

Hi all,

As the end of the year approaches and I start planning personal goals for next year, I thought I'd share an early update on a project I'm really excited about and hope will be a boon for the TiddlyWiki community: a TiddlyWiki textbook (written in TiddlyWiki, of course).

Right now we have (mostly) good technical documentation for advanced users, a thriving Google group, and plenty of introductions to TiddlyWiki, but nothing that bridges the gap by helping new users who are serious about learning the ins and outs of TiddlyWiki to build a complete understanding of TiddlyWiki concepts. That's what I'm hoping to fix.

One of the other things I'm excited about is my included prototype of a mnemonic medium in TiddlyWiki built on top of my TiddlyRemember plugin. This allows simple prompts to be embedded in the text, then reviewed at regular intervals controlled by a spaced-repetition algorithm, either with a simple native-TiddlyWiki reviewer or in Anki via TiddlyRemember. With this medium, learning and retaining large amounts of new terminology and syntax is much easier.

I've been working on this off and on for a few months and am hoping that within the next month or two, I'll have a solid draft. At that point I would like to send this out to a handful of people for an initial, rigorous round of private review and feedback. I would like to involve several expert users and several beginners (I'd love to see 2-3 in each category). Here's what I'd hope to hear from these reviewers:

Experts:

• See any outright errors? I'm sure I made a few.
• Did I miss any concepts or features that you use all the time or think are essential?
• For the resources at the end: What major resources or plugins would be worth including that I don't know about or haven't included?

Beginners:

• Did everything I wrote make sense?
• How well did the mnemonic medium work? Were the prompts effective? Did you understand how to use it?
• Did your TiddlyWiki skills improve?
• Were the exercises too hard? Too easy? Lacking enough information?
• Roughly how long did it take to work through the book?

I would be looking for a commitment to read through the whole book, ideally do most of the exercises, and offer substantive feedback. The book is currently about 70,000 words and includes plenty of exercises, so although I have no data on how long it will take to work through the book at this point, I can't imagine it would be a one-evening task. As compensation, I can offer early access to the book, your name in the acknowledgements, a $25 Amazon gift card (maybe more if there are fewer reviewers or I can cram it into my budget), and a huge thank-you to anyone who's willing to help out.

If you're interested in being involved when the time comes, please let me know here or by emailing contact at sorenbjornstad.com. If your ability to help out depends on the timeline, please let me know and I'll see what I can do.

[Soren Bjornstad]

It looks like the first screenshot of my mnemonic medium didn't upload correctly, so let's try that one again:

[Stobot]

Hello Soren - I would put myself in maybe an "intermediate" camp, though I have to say I'm curious/interested in other people's definitions of expertise. Mine are roughly:

1. Beginner (Built-in Macros) - Understand the general concept, general wikitext, linking, using at most the built-in macros (list-links etc.)

2. Intermediate (Widgets) - Understand a bit more of the underlying structure, uses an extensive amount of widgets and customizes the interface with it, uses templates

3. Expert (Javascript) - Understand how things actually work :) When stumped, fills in the blanks with CSS / Javascript - the plugin builders!

By these definitions I'd place myself in Intermediate, with aspirations (someday) of getting further. I'm interested in your project because I'm *definitely* a book learner, and feel that there's a good amount of material at the beginner and expert ends, and not as much in the middle. I've seen a few attempts at books and haven't seen any make it to the end. Eric Shulman had one going forever (pre TW5 even?) - not sure if that ever got published (if it did - please let me know!), then there was a recent effort around "the book" by kewapo (Luis?) that I saw a few chapters on and was excited for, but honestly don't know where that stands - don't see updates since February. I feel strongly that a comprehensive book would help the community a lot! My day job is "analytics" and I have a book going at all times on M, DAX, R, Python, SAC etc. If there was a great complete book on TW out there, it would help me tremendously!

If you need someone in that camp, let me know - I'd be happy to exchange labor of reading for benefit of understanding - though to make it worth it I'd love it to learn something in the process :) Reading the link you provided, it looks like we share some interests and are not too far away - I'm living in Cincinnati Ohio and travel frequently, and you're in Minnesota. If you hear of local meetups, let me know also :)

[David Gifford]

Hi Soren

1) You might want to team up with...shoot, my mind is drawing a blank. But there is someone from Spain who has been working on a book for over a year. He had quite a bit of material.

2) Would you consider a series of short videos? Or even offer a for-profit course based on a series of short videos? (similar to what Nat Eliason did for Roam Research). That would be more practical than a book for most users, and easier for you to update. If you did it well, you could make some money off of it! Nat's course allowed him to buy a second home. I doubt a TiddlyWiki course would do the same, unless TiddlyWiki suddenly took off, but at least it should be able to pay you back your time and expenses.

3) I am by Stobot's reckoning, an intermediate user. Normally I would love to look it over. But now that vacations are done, I am going to be swamped until April with my regular job. Sorry!

Blessings on your efforts. We really need more of that intermediate level stuff. Feel free to grab stuff from my https://giffmex.org/gifts/documenting.tw.html if it helps.

On Wednesday, December 30, 2020 at 5:34:13 PM UTC-6 Soren Bjornstad wrote:

[Brian Radspinner]

David, I'm guessing you mean The Book Wiki by Kewapo

[odin...@gmail.com]

Hi Soren!

I am an applied psychology student and I am using TiddlyWiki as a notetaking system/zettelkasten. I would rate myself between a beginner and intermediate by Stobots standards as I am starting to use widgets, but am often unsure how to use them properly. I would love to help out with reviewing! For one, because I would love to learn more about TiddlyWIki, two: Maybe my non-coding background can provide a perspective to see if the text is understandable for a broader audience, and three: I've been thinking about ways I could help people get into TiddlyWiki and this would be a way.

Op donderdag 31 december 2020 om 03:52:29 UTC+1 schreef Brian Radspinner:

[David Gifford]

Thanks Brian, that is the one!

[ludwa6]

Hey @Soren: Great initiative -am delighted to hear of it!  As one fighting his way up the learning curve (yet again -only this time for keeps! :-), i have to share a hard-won insight that i think can help the book (and the software), which is: separate the work into layers -minimum of 3- serving users at different levels of sophistication- and take real care to avoid mixing them up.

This is not a new insight; in fact -as you can see in this video of last TiddlyWiki hangout, around the 2 minute mark- Dave Gifford organized his "TiddlyWiki for the rest of us" site navigation around this principle, i.e. :

1. For beginners: reading TiddlyWikis on the Internet
2. For medium users: adding your own material to a TiddlyWiki file
3. For advanced users: Customize your TW experience

I realize there are no hard lines of division here, especially between levels 2&3, and while 90-odd% of us here might fairly be called an advanced-intermediate of some particular sort, i think we have got to respect the limits of one who is just trying to enjoy a read-only experience (including bread&butter functions like search, save, print), and keep level 2 and 3 functions a comfortable level-of-abstraction away.

Looks like i've lapsed into talking about TW5 tech itself, not the book -and, in a sense, this is appropriate: i think a book written in TW5, whether it be something along lines of The-Book-Wiki by "kewapo" or something entirely new and different, would be the *perfect* vehicle for deployment of such a work, which could serve as both a book and a pattern-library for other books to follow.

That's my €0.02 of input, Soren, FWIW.  Would be happy to offer feedback, if/whenever it may be ready -no charge, but then it might be difficult to offer a comprehensive review of 70k words, including test-run of all those exercises, etc, w/r/t any particular publishing deadline. (that would be a job for the pros at O'Reilly or some such, i think).  Best of luck w/ this; will be looking forward to more news on this front!

/walt

[Soren Bjornstad]

David, I see my efforts as complementary to The-Book. At least as it was when I last took a look at it, The-Book is focused mostly on how the internal bits of TiddlyWiki fit together and can be customized, although it does include scattered mentions of more basic concepts. Reading my book would prepare you to move on to The-Book if you had more advanced customization needs than I plan to cover – I'll point out things like global macros, CSS, view/edit/page templates, adding buttons, etc., but won't get too deep into them or try to list out all the possible hooks. I won't get very far into JavaScript either (partly because I don't know it very well, lol).

The videos are an interesting idea. I tend to be biased against videos as a learning method myself, just because for whatever reason my brain doesn't get along that well with video in general (I don't even watch movies or TV for entertainment more than once a month or so). But I recognize a lot of people find them very helpful, and I've done screencasts before and don't mind recording them. Perhaps it could be a future add-on to the book (maybe a premium version? hmm). I'm not convinced it would be easier to update, though. I've been here before, and if the interface changes significantly you pretty much have to re-record the whole video. In a book you can just rewrite the relevant sentences. For the same reason, I try to put as few screenshots in my documentation as possible.

@ludwa6, I like this idea of layers or rings of TiddlyWiki knowledge. I don't think there's space to fit a "reading TiddlyWikis on the internet" portion into this book the way it's structured, so that's a space for someone else to fill, but assuming that you want to have a TiddlyWiki and edit it, I hope my chapter divisions will help with this. To the extent that I am able while also keeping related content together, I'm trying to build it so you can reasonably stop studying at any point when you've learned what you need for the time being, and come back later (or never). I've explicitly called that out in the introduction.

The chapters right now are:

1. "The Shape of TiddlyWiki" (tiddlers, fields, links, tags, creating tiddlers and dividing things into tiddlers)
2. "Filing and Organizing" (searching, browsing tiddlers, choosing titles, creating tables of contents)
3. "Filtering and Formatting" (filters, brief introduction to HTML and widgets, creating lists)
4. "Macros, Variables, and Transclusions" (self-explanatory)
5. "More Organizational Tools" (everything that didn't fit in 2-4, including ordering lists, filters with multiple runs, attachments, tabs, and data tiddlers) – this is the only chapter I'm concerned about from an ordering perspective right now, and I'll keep thinking about it; some might be able to move into 2 now that I've split 2 and 3 up
6. "Looking Under the Hood" (system tiddlers, plugins, putting things in TiddlyWiki's interface by tagging them appropriately, input widgets and buttons, a couple of projects)
7. "Getting Technical" (JavaScript macros, creating plugins, CSS, Node.JS)

Plus front matter, supplemental exercises, resources, and a couple of short appendices.

I don't want to derail this thread by steering it into a critique of the chapter divisions, but if you see anything that looks terribly wrong, let me know.

[Osin]

Hi Soren,

I'd like to participate. I am in the beginner-intermediate category, currently working on making an FAQ Wiki at work and trying to figure out how to make the different pieces fit together. I don't have a programming background, although I'm fairly tech-savvy. Going through the official documentation was a bit painful, with much jargo, so I've had to look for definitions of some concepts and examples myself, so something to ease that transition would be welcome.

Thanks

[PMario]

Hi Soren,

I'd be interested in proofreading it, but can't use the "reply to author" button.

My github profile contains an e-mail link

-m

[Mohammad Rahmani]

Great idea!

I have written a chapter in the Tiddlywiki book by Luis Gonzalez on making TW plugins (no JS). The code and example is here (http://sistan.tiddlyspot.com/)

I would be happy to review/comment on scripting.

It is important to set up  the project somewhere volunteers can collaborate. GitHub is not good for this. The vanilla Tiddlywiki is also not a good option for writing a book.

Best wishes

Mohammad

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tiddlywiki+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/0589fb49-67b5-4fd8-82cb-37f989df70cfn%40googlegroups.com.

[Mohammad Rahmani]

If there is a plan to create a website as a self tutorial for TW beginners an idea like 

https://cssgridgarden.com/

is good. This can be simply created using Tiddlywiki. 

I think Eric Shulman filter generator is something like the above. I highly recommend Eric stuff for such purposes.

The Regexp in Tiddlywiki, a collaborative work by Mark S, Josiah and me is another example (http://tw-regexp.tiddlyspot.com/)

TW-Scripts is always a great place to start!

Best wishes

Mohammad

On Thu, Dec 31, 2020 at 3:04 AM Soren Bjornstad <soren.b...@gmail.com> wrote:

--

[si]

Hi Soren,

This might be slightly offtopic, but I'm curious how you have implemented the native reviewer? Is this something that you would be willing to share publicly?

I also would be keen to take part in reviewing the book. Though although I have a lot to learn about TiddlyWiki, I would not consider myself a beginner (but definitely not an expert).

Looks like a great project!

[Soren Bjornstad]

Thanks in advance to everyone who's responded so far! Please feel free to keep volunteering. I might not be able to involve everyone, but would rather have too many on my list than too few, especially since people's availability can change.

Si, the native reviewer is pure wikitext using an Anki/SM2-like algorithm, with each card in a tiddler and fields keeping track of the scheduling information (right now it just tracks ease, interval, and the next due date, but I'd like to track lapses and maybe review history in the future as well). The cards aren't fully randomized at the moment – right now it just filters on all the cards due today or in the past and does the first[] operator and shows that card – but that's just a matter of plugging in a randomize filter operator from somewhere. I literally just started writing it on Tuesday and it's still very much in active development, so I'm not ready to share anything yet, but I do eventually hope to make it into a plugin that complements TiddlyRemember, perhaps bundled with the other mnemonic-medium features.

The primary weakness for someone not used to TiddlyWiki or spaced repetition is needing to download the wiki and identify a method of saving to keep their progress, which might scare people off from the start. Obviously, in this use case that's not a big problem since the content is about learning TiddlyWiki, but it might limit the broad usefulness of the tool. A really cool addition would be a web service that could automatically clone a copy of the wiki out to a cloud-hosted location for the user (maybe embedding the access credentials in the wiki as it did so?).

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

I would be glad to help out in the development of what is sounding like a great resource for the community :)

At one point in time I considered myself to be an (almost) Intermediate user, but after having let several years pass me by without keeping up with the inner workings of TW, I would now be solidly classified as a Beginner level user.

The monetary reward wouldn't really be necessary (unless you have an over abundance of cash to throw away :-P ), just free access to the finished work would be compensation enough.

Thank You

--Zaphod

[si]

> I literally just started writing it on Tuesday and it's still very much in active development, so I'm not ready to share anything yet, but I do eventually hope to make it into a plugin that complements TiddlyRemember, perhaps bundled with the other mnemonic-medium features.

Yes please do! I use TiddlyRemember all the time, but there are definitely some cases where I would benefit from an internal system.

[springa...@gmail.com]

I'm an absolute beginner.  I'd love to help proofread it if you still need volunteers

[Soren Bjornstad]

I have a draft just about ready for review, but it looks like the group as configured doesn't allow me to see the contact information of anyone who posted. Could everyone who was interested in participating please take 30 seconds to fill out this Google form with your email address?

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSetcYknEP3bbJN38u1jpp2QJIHQUyhYArdc-ZQk7aSrQuqskA/viewform?usp=sf_link

I am looking at having this out to you all by the end of the week and would love to have your feedback gathered in by early to mid-March. I will email you with further details once you have filled out the form.

Thanks!

[Odin]

I have filled it in! Looking forward.

Op dinsdag 9 februari 2021 om 03:55:29 UTC+1 schreef Soren Bjornstad:

[PMario]

Hi,

-as in my first post

My github profile contains an e-mail link

-m

[ludwa6]

@Soren : Amazing piece of work, mate!  I just downloaded it last night on my iPad, fully expecting to nod-off in <15min (a nice fat eBook on some tech topic is my favourite form of sleeping pill :-)... But then the darn thing kept me going *way* into the wee-hours, until i must either get up and get working in TiddlyDesktop (had some trouble saving a local copy on iPad via Quine2 [note1]), or else power-down somehow (which i finally did... But it wasn't easy!). 

So i think it's fair to say -at least for those like me that already quite into TiddlyWiki, but also with serious gaps in know-how, begging to be filled- this book is a great resource, even in current form.  To be clear: this is no "5hi++y first draft" (as authors are advised these days to call their first Request For Comments);  it's a very broad and deep treatment of the subject, organised by a guy who really knows the tool and how to use it to max advantage.  Moreover: Soren brings some progressive learning theory to the table, in the form of this "Takeways" feature (i.e. granular Q&A exercises in context) that really works.  

Check it out!

/walt

[Soren Bjornstad]

Thanks Walt!

Apologies to some of those who signed up later and before I had the chance to switch submissions off, but I've had to cut some folks off to keep the private preview at a manageable size. Please stay tuned – if all goes well, I will have a public release in a month or two (and I'll continue accepting feedback for further improvements at that point).

If anyone who threw their hat into the ring back in January has not received an email or an invitation to the google group, please let me know. I don't want to leave you out when you were first.

[stan...@gmail.com]

Is there some way to read the book on an old iPad? I have an iPad mini 4, iOS 12.5, so Quine 2 is not an option.  I tried the simplistic approach of downloading the book using Firefox, but for the life of me, could not figure out how to load it to read the book.  I also tried Safari, Firefox Focus, Dolphin (in desperation!) and finally went to sleep.  A tablet version sans Quine 2 would be attractive - I don't want to take my Chromebook or one of my MacBook Airs to bed. 

[Soren Bjornstad]

Stan, I've seen the same problem and unfortunately have not found a solution (my phone is new enough, I just haven't downloaded Quine). It's kind of bizarre that Apple doesn't have a way to open an HTML file on your phone (except in preview, which doesn't work since it doesn't have JS), even though you have both a browser and a file storage area.

In any case, you're probably going to want to be able to save changes to the book to track your progress on the takeaways, so I'm not sure direct access through Firefox would work out well for this use case anyway.

[ludwa6]

Now that i've got some experience w/ the spaced-repetition dynamic of the Takeaway feature (since only night before last, i can see how it's helping my recall), i have to agree with Soren: a read-only version of this book is just not the same thing -not even close.  That being said: until i got the editable version working in Quine (as previously described), i still got a lot out of it in that mode.  But if i had a MacBook Air, @stan, i'd be sorely tempted to take it to bed, because i *so* hate typing on glass, and yet this book really inspires you to get weave some wiki.

Speaking of which, @Soren, i have to ask: When the inevitable revision(s) to this book come out, how do we upgrade without losing our edits?  You mentioned something about this in another thread, but i'm still not clear from a user perspective how this is supposed to work.  Would appreciate if you could explain.

/walt

[Soren Bjornstad]

On Saturday, February 13, 2021 at 12:39:34 PM UTC-6 ludwa6 wrote:

Speaking of which, @Soren, i have to ask: When the inevitable revision(s) to this book come out, how do we upgrade without losing our edits?  You mentioned something about this in another thread, but i'm still not clear from a user perspective how this is supposed to work.  Would appreciate if you could explain.

This isn't something I had gotten to figuring out before I distributed this version, so it is still up in the air. My thinking is that I would add a button somewhere in the settings that would export all content that should be saved (would takeaways, snippets, and notes on completed exercises cover it for you, or were you hoping to be able to add other tiddlers of your own?) and then import it into your new wiki.

Another (probably harder) possibility would be to hack something on top of the TiddlyWiki upgrade mechanism.

 

[ludwa6]

I don't (yet) understand enough about the tech to know which of your two possible approaches to upgrade would work better, Soren, but it looks to me like the central challenge is how to distinguish between two different sources of content -i.e. Author and User- correct? If so, this puts me to wonder if maybe that "Username for signing edits" parameter that sits right under Title & Subtitle params in the ControlPanel might be a key to solving the problem.

This leads straight into your Q: "Would takeaways, snippets, and notes on completed exercises cover it for you, or were you hoping to be able to add other tiddlers of your own?" Again: it is still early in the game for me to answer this with confidence, but i feel at this point like i need to be adding some tiddlers -"intertwingled" with Author's content, naturally- for reasons i hope you can understand. To explain about this, two cases i'm presently dealing come to mind:

1. There is the issue of "Naming Conventions" : an essential feature of the problem-space that is wiki, which you treat very well in the so-named tiddler. I moreover appreciated the link provided to your Zettelkasten, which i would call a good example of Best Practice... And yet my own particular example is going to differ somewhat, for reasons i would like to document in context of this book, which has to work as a standalone entity, even in offline mode. This leads me into the next case.

2. Mobile Application: As mentioned earlier in this thread, i want this book working on my tablet in uncompromised (i.e. fully interactive) form, so i can take it to bed or to the beach or anyplace i want even w/o internet connection. In my case, the solution is Quine2 app on iPad -a niche case perhaps, which you may or may not choose to address in future revision- while Stan has a somewhat different mobile scenario calling for a different solution... And in any case, we must all build our own particular workflows around some combination of purposes and tools and constraints that maybe nobody else in the world will share.

I will sum up by saying @Soren : what you've created in GTW is not just another book, but rather a platform for TW learners to make their way up the learning curve by building their own "Scaffolding" (a term of art in current learning theory, as i expect you probably know) as they go, so... Our challenge here is to find a way that we can integrate whatever improvements you make to the platform, without compromising the scaffolding we users have built on previous versions of it.

I hope this makes sense, and is something that can be easily-enough developed w/ the existing tech, because that will make of GTW a real breakthrough work -not only here in the TW community, but moreover in the wider world of educational tech, where such tools are sorely needed.

/walt

[stan...@gmail.com]

@Soren, @Walt, you are both right about the need for an editable version of GTW.  I was hoping to be able to have one on my iPad, but I ditched the idea yesterday afternoon after reading both of your messages.  The nice part about using the Chromebook is that I can have two copies, side by side: The first I am reading (and doing the exercises) and the second I am using for my editing suggestions.  The latter I will send back to @Soren.   

Stan

[Ray Vermey]

Hi, as a (re)beginner (after 6 years or so) i am starting to enjoy TW5 again and can use some info and exercises

So i would like to volunteer for proofreading your book.

Just drop me a line and tell me what to do ;-)

Great initiative!

Ray

Op zondag 14 februari 2021 om 14:46:45 UTC+1 schreef stan...@gmail.com: