Why is there no actual "TiddlyWiki For Dummies" book? Someone please write one!

[madscijr]

Just sayin'.  I would find it useful, if only the way the Dummies books are structured. 

Maybe dedicate half the book to TW Classic and half to TW 5? 

[Josiah]

I totally agree. Deeper functioning of TW is quite hard to grasp. The Dummies books understand that detailed, concrete, examples are essential for non-programmers to be able to grasp what the hell is going on.

Eric Shulman tried to raise money to be freed to do something like that. I don't think he raised enough.

Josiah

[c pa]

So to be clear you want a book, or a wiki on tiddlyspot that gives step by step instructions on how to "use" TiddlyWiki. One of the difficulties in this is the term "use" which implies use-cases for the product. I've had conversations with a number of people who use TiddlyWiki, folks seem to have little trouble using TW for the out-of-the-box purpose: to do lists, notes tagging, and "outlining a book". The trouble seems to come when folks see the endless possibilities of the product and start trying to achieve their vision of the perfect tool to perform x, y, or z.

So a sample outline below . . . please respond with additional topics you want covered

What is TW
          What is a wiki
          What is a single page application
          What is a tiddler
          Downloading and installing
Using TW out of the box
          Creating tiddlers
          Deleting tiddlers
          Tagging tiddlers
          Finding and opening tagged tiddlers
          Browsing the open and recently created tiddlers
          Renaming your wiki
          Setting the list of open tiddlers when you start the wiki
          Changing how the wiki looks
          Changing how the wiki behaves
Substituting text
           Macros - writing a macro to insert standard text phrases
           Macros - writing a macro that inserts a phrase with substituted text
           Setting variables
           Storing values in tags
           Storing values in a field
           Storing values in a data dictionary
           Storing values in json
Listing things
           Listing tiddlers that have a specific tag
           Listing content from tiddlers with a specific tag
           Listing content from a field
           Listing content from a data dictionary
           Listing content from json
Setting values using a button
           Setting values in a field
           Setting values in a data dictionary
           Setting values in a json
Making things appear and disappear
           Using the $reveal widget
           Using the $list widget
Documenting your code
           Using standard macro names
           Using standard parameter names
           Commenting your code
           Documenting usage of macros
           Creating examples for your macros
Things that are hard to do in TW out-of-the-box
           Passing an index into a list
           Reducing the number of state and temp tiddlers created
           Passing calculated strings to a macro
Example TW applications
           To Do list
           Daily Journals
           Animated buttons

[Josiah]

c pa

There are at least two answers to you question.

I think you are RIGHT in highlighting that many, many people ARE using TW out-of-the-box very happily.

The trouble seems to come when folks see the endless possibilities of the product...

I am not sure its a problem. But its not well addressed. CASE uses would be the way IMO to refine that list.

Personally I need to better understand ...

• The different ways to transclude.
• How to use the datauri macro to pass tiddlers to URLS to post to external sites.
• The tricky issue of working effectively in the central (brilliant) tiddler type text/vnd.tiddlywiki combining many different things.
  

Josiah

[iain]

I suppose Eric might have something to say on this topic!!

[Mark S.]

That's a nice outline. Makes me wonder if what's really wanted is a TW cookbook.

Mark.

[Mat]

c pa, 

I agree with Mark S - nice outline! (surely too well formulated to have been improvised just now, right!?)

A topic missing is IMO how to modify layout and appearance, i.e beyond Controlpanel stuff, like changing the page layout or adding page elements. Maybe it belongs under "Things that are hard to do..." chapter. I think it is a basic question in that if someone has a particular use case in mind, before they actually see TW, they probably also have a vision of what it should look like.

<:-)

[Ed]

For Dummies, eh?
Therefore some dumm questions

What is a data dictionary?
What is json?
What is a macro?
What is a widget?
What's this "$"sign for Pete's sake?
What is a state tiddler?
What is a temp tiddler?

There should be a part of the book that explains things like that before
people must make the jump to the substiting text, listing etc. In the list
here I find this kind of chapter missing.

Take e.g. "widget"
Say a dummy is researching tiddlywiki.com and looking for a definition of
the word "widget".
He finds:
"TiddlyWiki's display is driven by an underlying collection of widgets. These

are organised into a tree structure: each widget has a parent widget and

zero or more child widgets.

TiddlyWiki generates this widget tree by parsing the WikiText of tiddlers.

Each component of the WikiText syntax, including even the trivial case of

ordinary text, generates a corresponding widget. The widget tree is an

intermediate representation that is subsequently rendered into the actual display.

Widgets are analogous to elements in an HTML document. Indeed, HTML tags

in WikiText generate dedicated element widgets."

Yeah, right. Is this helpful?

Another problem is writing. A great programmer is not necessarily a great writer

of manuals. How many people suffered [ 8-((( ] trying to understand the text in

the manual of their videorecorder. If all that kind of people gave me a nickel I could

live like a king into at least my next reïncarnation.

Salut! Ed.

Op maandag 6 juni 2016 16:39:12 UTC+2 schreef madscijr:

[Marc Ferguson]

There is also a need be a simple glossary. TW seems to have lots of specialized vocabulary. 

Sent from my iPhone

--
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 post to this group, send email to tiddl...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/a863ac0d-595d-446c-8c4b-07afe27c6860%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[RichardWilliamSmith]

We should write a book together.

[Sylvain Naudin]

Le mardi 7 juin 2016 13:33:26 UTC+2, RichardWilliamSmith a écrit :

We should write a book together.

Yes, for example with https://en.flossmanuals.net

[RichardWilliamSmith]

I think we should use TiddlyWiki to make the TiddlyWiki manual. 

Instead of having a central place where the 'official' documentation lives, I would like to see if we couldn't 'grow' the documentation for ourselves. What do you think? You could each take the attached file and add whatever you like - questions, solutions, notes, random-thoughts, suggested schemes, whatever you like and post the results back here as often as you like. Then we can start to remix each other's work, create different versions etc. etc. and see what it turns into. 

By doing this I think we will also learn something about the kind of collaboration tools (federation etc.) we would like to build out as well. The revolution will be distributed.

Regards,

Richard

[Jed Carty]

A collaborative users guide is sort of what the various reference sites are now. We don't have any central editor though, which would help. Feel free to take anything from http://inmysocks.tiddlyspot.com or any of my other sites that you find useful. 

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Thanks Jed, but I'm certainly not volunteering to be the central anything. Distribution is the way - what belongs to no-one, belongs to everyone. At least, that's what I'd like to try.

Your site and others (Tobias, Mat etc. etc.) already fulfil the purpose of what I am suggesting here - to collect reference materials for others to use - thankyou to all of you for taking the lead. All I'm suggesting is having a particular document that we openly bat around between us (any who want to) until we agree that it serves as something-like-a-user-guide and not worrying too much if it exists in multiple states and myriad versions. And then we can figure out where we want to post it and how we will maintain it. But let's make it first!

It would be great if we can let our work in this area be shaped by the needs of the newest users and contributors, who are still closest to the (sometimes frustrating) sense of bafflement we all had to go through when we learned to use TW.

Regards,

Richard

[Mat]

Yes, of course we should "write a TW" rather than a book. But the "we write colletively" is problematic as long as we don't have you-know-what, set up.... yeah, I'm talking about a TWevolution... or maybe I mean a TWederation. Once this is up, I think a really good manual will grow almost automatically because, as noted, quite a few individuals are interested in sharing their knowledge and ideas. We only lack the infrastructure. Fellow Jed has taken the first bold steps but he is of course no more responsible than anyone else.

<:-)

[Mark S.]

This sounds like a really messy way to put a book together.

TW isn't really good at collaboration. It might be better to use Google docs or a server based Wiki.

In any event, if you want the quality to be even and consistent, the logic flow not to skip back and forth, and the document to speak with one voice, it needs an editor.

Mark

[Jed Carty]

Making tiddlywiki work well for collaboration is the purpose of twederation, so hopefully that part will not be a problem soon. 

[Mat]

On Tuesday, June 7, 2016 at 7:44:59 PM UTC+2, Mark S. wrote:

This sounds like a really messy way to put a book together.

TW isn't really good at collaboration. It might be better to use Google docs or a server based Wiki.

In any event, if you want the quality to be even and consistent, the logic flow not to skip back and forth, and the document to speak with one voice, it needs an editor.

Mark S - given the premises, i.e no money etc, i think a collaborative effort (using TWederation) is the only realistic way to get it done. And when we do eventually have a working TWederation system I think it will be very doable.

For anyone who doesn't quite know what this means, it would(will!) mean a system where a TW can "subscribe" to other TWs, so to fetch and accumulate material from them. A bit like fellow Erwans Community Aggregator. If published content is freely fetchable, different people could accumulate subsets from the same content and as hosts (editoris) for their own TW give the aggregation their own flavor and angle. (Again, note that Jed has already proven the concept for the technical parts of this.)

<:-)

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Mat - What tools do you think federation will give us that we don't already have? My understanding is that it will mostly be a way to check for updates to other people's wikis and pull content across automatically? The wikis involved in that process will each need to be hosted and visible to the internet and they will each contain different material in total. Is that right? 

Mark - We don't have an editor. You can try setting up a collaborative (online) space for people to use, but personally I don't think that will work any better. The advantage of my proposal is that everyone is free to contribute whatever they feel is missing and to organise the material in a way that suits them - if enough people were to contribute, I think we would start to see something emerging which could be refined for 'official' use.

Regards,

Richard

[Ed]

Hi Dear All,

A good manual in whatever form either a real book or a tiddlywiki is long overdue.
Jeremy told us that there are about 15,000 users all over the globe. That's zilch
considering the enourmous power that seems/is hidden in the software.
When I see what beautiful stuff some people can make; it's absolutely amazing.

That indeed IS one of the problems as people looking around to get more out of
the plain vanilla tiddlywiki they have been using so far. They feel that they are not
using it to its fuller potential and specific use cases they might have could really
benefit from better understanding and better structured help. At present most of the
available documentation is NOT very helpful.

Take e.g. Tiddlywiki on node.js. The tiddler "Getting Starting - Node.js" is very
helpful as it describes the process nicely step by step. Being an absolute nitwit
as far as Node.je is concerned I managed to get the Tiddlywiki up and running.
(Though, I would like to see, even here, a tiddler dealing with Windows, one other
tiddler dealing with Mac stuff and third one explaining it to the Linuxians)

Ok, then you go to the tiddler "Using TiddlyWiki on Node.js", because you want
to use it. Right? Does it help a beginner the way the other tiddler did? No.
It does not help one bit.

Initial documentation is easy, but the next step seems always not a step, but a
bridge too far. That goes for most the documentation available. So when somebody
writes a manual or chapters of a manual he/she should take care to proceed in a
gradual way.
- Preferably at the beginning of any chapter some sort of entry level should be described.

The beauty of TiddlyWiki is so obvious to many of us that quite a number of people
like to share what they make and I highly appreciate that, please believe me, but at
the same time they create, being creative people, a problem, when the tiddlywiki created
deviates much from the plainest vanilla tiddlywiki.
- So anything written for the TWManual should be a simply as possible. No fancy colors,
no fancy layouts. Only the stuff that is really necessary for the specific problem or use
case at hand should be included.

Of course TiddlyWiki is very inviting. The technlogy begs to go ahead and e.g transclude
from all over the place. The globe is our playground, isn't? But having worked in publishing
I think differently. Any publisher can and will tell you that
- you really need (an) EDITOR(S) responsable for the total outlook and writing style of the
(final)(emerging) product. It will be in English initially, so remember that not all the potential
users have the same grasp of the language. I am myself not very happy with my English.
We don't want to be stuck at 15,000 users, we want more, being the evangelists we are. 8-))

- Obviously, the work on the manual should be done some place else. NOT here in this group.
 Uhoh... It's late here, gotta stop. My better half is pulling me away from the keyboard.

Salut! Ed.




Op maandag 6 juni 2016 16:39:12 UTC+2 schreef madscijr:

Just sayin'.  I would find it useful, if only the way the Dummies books are structured. 

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Hi Ed,

Why do you say that the work should be done elsewhere, other than this group? This is the only place that everybody in the community regularly refers to, so it seems the logical place to start. 

The call for a user guide / improved documentation is one that has been regularly repeated over the last several years - we need to actually start something and the plainest way to do that is for the new users who have questions to collaborate with the more experienced users who may have some answers and put something together that is at least of //some// use.

I really think that distributed writing can work but it does require people to ditch some of the old assumptions about authority and hierarchy.

A traditional model might have a 'master' draft document under the control of an editor, to which other people would submit contributions for approval. A much more 'messy', distributed approach might have 20 contributors, each maintaining their own working draft and drawing freely on each other's work in order to 'evolve towards' a finished product.

The benefit to doing it this way is that nobody ever needs permission or approval to contribute. There is also never any need for disagreement because there is never a problem with maintaining multiple versions.

Perhaps it's idealistic/naive to suppose that this can work, but there is only one way to find out.

Regards,

Richard

[Mat]

RichardWilliamSmith wrote:

Mat - What tools do you think federation will give us that we don't already have? My understanding is that it will mostly be a way to check for updates to other people's wikis and pull content across automatically?

I'm not sure what you include as "tools we already have" but here I describe two "cases" that I think are significant. When communication and fetching of tiddlers becomes possible, there can be shift to content among people (where a TW manual is one example). I think we'll see a number of high level setups (or "tools" if you will) that can change things significantly.

One such could be the equivalent to an app store with addons that have reviews and other user comments. This could minimize the "dispersal problem" for plugins we've suffered since TW inception.

 

The wikis involved in that process will each need to be hosted and visible to the internet and they will each contain different material in total. Is that right? 

Pretty much so, yes. The TW's to fetch from will have to be online, at the time of fetching, but there are many hosting solutions, probably also including dropbox and similar. And, regarding "at the time of fetching"; since TW content is often pretty static (typically made for offline viewing) it is not necessary to have it visible all the time, only enough for it to be fetched by someone else at some point - and then it can be redistributed via that second TW. I'd think that we'd even, among our users, have a few who are willing to let up actual server space to host "hubs" for aggregating TWs. That would be a luxury, but not necessary for TWederation. But overall TWederation does rely much on a continued "sharing spirit".

<:-)

[Mat]

Additional notes; as evidenced from this google group, there is no end to TW questions and matters to discuss. Unfortunately, most stuff here is probably lost in the archives for most people at the time when they would benefit from it. It would be much better (I think) with a kind of knowledge base building up like a federated wikipedia or stack overflow kind of system, where articles could be gradually refined and - thanks to tiddler philosophy- sometimes reused in different contexts. A TW manual will be a small subset - or perhaps a TW manual will just be a label that is not relevant, just like this Google group is not a "manual" but partially overlaps in purpose.

What is extraordinary, at least one aspect of it, is the combination of the federated idea and a common base (i.e TW) that every individual has so it can be filled with any of the fragments that others make public. For the case of "a manual" - my manual will not be the same as yours unless, perhaps, one of us is an authority and the other just says "this guy has good taste, I'll just take his/her word for it and blindly copy his/her version".

In all, I believe it is a very different system but as Richard just noted above; there's only one way to know if it will work. 

BTW, I hope TiddlyWeb or perhaps the node-js version will get a more prominent place so that it's actually tiddlers we're sharing rather than full TWs (like on TiddlySpace but without being locked to one server). TiddlyWeb and nodejs-TW are matters I'm too unfamiliar with to talk about comfortably though. 

(Versioning will likely become a matter we'll have to work on.)

<:-)

[Jed Carty]

Richard, 

We have not done a good job of showing what is possible with twederation, but one thing it will do is greatly simplify collaborative editing in tiddlywiki and allow something resembling a multi user wiki. Hopefully there will be a working playground soon so I won't give to much of an explanation here. 

Also it wasn't completely clear from what you said but you can use a wiki on your computer to pull contents from one online, they don't both need to be hosted online unless there is two way communication. 

For twederation we are barely at the proof of concept stage so the potential is mostly unknown but me and Mat have discussed some interesting ideas for collaboration and distributed communication we want to try one it is up and running. 

[Josiah]

Ed & others,

The 15,000 quoted NUMBER OF USERS is likely not the case. The number of TW users worldwide is likely far, FAR HIGHER. A lot of people are trialing/using tiddly-wiki straight out of the box. We know that because of the level of TiddlyFox downloads. Jeremy, I and SimonBeard cover some indicative stats starting here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/tiddlywiki/g_YeDXCvZGY.

The real figures are likely higher yet as there are other platforms and ways of using TW not accounted for.

So, though the exact number of regular users is unknowable, its fairly clear, there is a large, largely silent, userbase.

Best wishes
Josiah

[Josiah]

Ciao tutti,

I have read this thread with great interest. I can make some simple points which I think may be relevant...

1 - I see several INTER-RELATED issues. Perhaps the most publicly significant of them is that the high level TiddlyWiki's a potential user FIRST encounters on the net are, basically, technical manuals. I'm not sure that is such a good idea to have so upfront on first encounter.

2 - Whilst programmers tend towards grasping how fundamental atomic units work & can be combined, Learner USERS, like me, tend to gravitate more to complete, working examples, i.e. demonstration TiddlyWiki's from different fields of USE. Whilst the top level TiddlyWiki 5 lists some great examples they are probably NOT upfront enough? Its taken me AGES to find good TiddlyWiki's that do some of the things I want to do. I consider THAT also a form of Documentation by Demonstration.

3 - There is a A LOT of GREAT proto-DOCUMENTATION right here in the various TW Google discussion groups. Unfortunately it is very difficult to search to find exactly where the gems are. These forums are largely about transient immediate problem solving. So the history of the good stuff gets lost. Its not built in a way that is organised. I did look back on a few issues and noticed a HUGE amount of RE-CREATING the wheel that better organization would likely reduce. Perhaps the questions asked here could be surveyed & picked over to aid the documentation agenda and provide some content?

4 - Its basic that documentation of the "Dummies" type is not just documentation. Its a LEARNING PROCESS based on iterative practical DOING. You get the flavour of how that kind of thing works with the good {{DesignWrITe}} project. I think its worth considering if at least part of "The Missing Manual" might be better conceptualised as a Modular Training Program. Possibly developed iteratively with non-tech users.

Best wishes
Josiah

[c pa]

OK I've started the doc on tiddlyspot here:

http://tw-for-bunnies.tiddlyspot.com/

Please provide comments on style and usability. Right now many of the pages are empty.
Also if you have suggested edits, either post the wiki text here or create a page of your own and post it here. I'll copy and paste to the doc.

[Birthe C]

Hi cpa,

I really like your slidehow changes, but would you please consider turning off sticky titles?


Birthe

[Ed]

Dear c pa,

I am sorry, but are you serious? This is definitey not the way to start. I think this is not the way that people should be talked to.

TiddlyWiki is already hampered by the title itself. We actual users are used to the word, but newcomers ask What wiki, What's tiddly?
So the title might be funny "for Bunnies" and it can be changed of course, but palease don't try to be a clown.

On the first page you write

• This web page is a work in progress newbie guide to tiddlywiki as requested here
• This is based on talkytalky
• With the addition of some crazyListHere and a slides view template

For total beginners, novices this is useless information. Why would they need to know who reqeusted this manual.
Why talk about talkytalky. Again funny stuff "crazyListHere". What's a "slides view template" they might ask.

Please NO, jargon to start with as in "individual divs stored in the single file" What are "divs"?

This is quite offputting.

Why for Pete's sake do you want to explain macroworkings by using dirty words like Mommybanger?

The lay-out is way off compared to the tiddlywiki that new users download and use out-of-the box, this bewildering.

This is NOT the way to go! I permit myself a joke: What have you been smoking? Forget it!

Salut! Edm.

Op woensdag 8 juni 2016 20:04:32 UTC+2 schreef c pa:

[Ed]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for your comments, really! 8-))

I would like to develop this project in another place as here too many other things are happening.
Google Groups seems btw to me quite antiquated. I'd rather have some forum like xenforo.
One might have to search for specific threads or it should be all in one thread.
Also it is of such importance that it really deserves it's own place, just like the Dev, Group.

"I really think that distributed writing can work but it does require people to ditch some of the old
assumptions about authority and hierarchy."

Well I have no problem with that being an old anarchist, meaning authority and hierarchy are seen by me
as hampering development und mutual understanding. Ni Dieu ni maître!

When I suggets one or more editors I do not mean it in the old sense, you describe!! But there should be
some general understanding that we e.g. use the same style in our tiddlers. If we start out a tiddler with
a preamble describing a certain entry level for example then everybody should do that the same way
to make a coherent visual impression on the reader. He/She knows what to expect beforehand.

We want to appeal to as many potential users as possible. Another little example Everybody should use
the same font. Whole stylebooks have been written to make newspapers readable and a tiddler is just a
page from a journal, as far as reading is concerned. Using specific jargon should be carefully handled and
only used if the level of experise of the novice allows it. Using on the third page of a manual the word "div"
is useless, unless you are quite sure that the reader knows what a "div" and its function is.

I certainly do not call you idealistic nor naive! But there things that have shown to be working since
Gutenberg and why not use that expertise.

Wished I had more time, but Now I am really of to bed otherwise she might divorce me. 8-))
Salut! Ed
=======


Op woensdag 8 juni 2016 07:19:38 UTC+2 schreef RichardWilliamSmith:

[Birthe C]

Hi Ed,

I thought, that was explanation of the changes c pa has done on the workings of the slidehow. Explanation for us to be able to use it. The content for the user is the outline proposed the other day. The content has not been written yet.

I know my English is very bad, so I will not be able to write anything for the user guide. Why do you think the idea of using a slidehow for this is so bad? I find it could help concentrate on one subject at a time without being distracted by buttons and sidebars. For the introduction to tiddlywiki that could work. If content will ever be written it can be presented in all the ways people can think of. I think that the subject of writing for new users have been discussed several times and always drown in technical discussions and still no "tiddlywiki for dummies".

Ed...a consistent style is of course the right way things should be done....but I fear that this once again ends up with nothing written.

It is important not to scare anyone from taking part in writing for this.


Birthe

[Chuck R.]

For Dummies, eh?
Therefore some dumm questions

What is a data dictionary?
What is json?
What is a macro?
What is a widget?
What's this "$"sign for Pete's sake?
What is a state tiddler?
What is a temp tiddler?

I have decades of experience working with new users. They are easily put off by unnecessary technical jargon.

I wouldn't get too technitickle on these issues above. New users would assume they have to know this for the functioning of the product, when really these terms are just a curiosity. Maybe put these sections at the end of the book in an appendix? And mention these appendix sections in the intro?

As a rather new user to TW I think I would be good at writing this book if anyone wants help. Or if they want me to proof it to make sure it's understandable to new users of TW5. Proofreading is another part of my day job.

[c pa]

Ed,

>> For total beginners, novices this is useless information.

>> Please NO, jargon to start with as in "individual divs stored in the single file" What are "divs"?

>> Why for Pete's sake do you want to explain

Excellent points. Changes made.

Everyone,

These are the kinds of comments I'm looking for.

[Mat]

c pa  - Nice initiative!

A really important (and well meaning!!!) question; What makes this one different from the previous initiatives from other people? What would make it successful - not only for you personally (maybe a fantastic TW manual is enough) but also how will it become something that the target group actually uses? (Half joke: If the answer mentions the word TWederation I'll be convinced ;-)

A thing talking for its success is that it's you leading it (ref to your competence and long history as a prominent community member).

Ok, specifics;

IMO the faint blue font color is difficult to see when white background.

Like for the blue lines, I think it would be valuable if the can hover over as many things as possible to get tooltips (...but the term "tooltip" itself is bad). And, of course, a very early mention of this feature.

The blue line is good conceptually. The red dot confuses me in spite of info that "separates levels" ...levels of what? difficulty? If it is a way to group the blue lines, then maybe some other way would be better. Perhaps hovering over a blue line makes the background for it's whole "level" shift color, along with the name of that "level"?

"Navigation pills showing previous _ and subsequent _ slides to this one"

..."navigation pills"? If you're referring to the blue lines then the sentence is unclear but I also think it is not an appropriate term because they don't look like pills. At  most they look like the stuff you put on ice cream. Must be blueberry flavor..mmmm... ah, this explains the red dots too; strawberry of course... 

<:-)

[Jeremy Ruston]

It may be worth mentioning that there is a more-or-less dormant discussion group that we set up for talking about documentation improvements:

http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywikidocs

Best wishes

Jeremy

--
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 post to this group, send email to tiddl...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/2c96b521-cc5b-4765-aeda-ba08fcdd702c%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Josiah]

Ciao Mat & c pa

I find I want to comment again on this thread. Especially your contributions.

The re-creation of the wheel on this is a distinct danger IMO. Its great to see initiatives, & the energy & the care behind them. But getting real traction I don't think is at all easy.

As I am an idiot as far as understanding the deeper working of TiddlyWiki is concerned I will hazard a few things ... again :-)

1. Documentation to me without concrete demonstration of END RESULTS in working TiddlyWikis is all "foo-bar blah".
2. I am not so sure what is needed is documentation so much as active TRAINING modules on the different facets of TW that are dealt with through DETAILED USE CASES.
3. I think the {{DesignWrITe}} approach gives some clues on one way to do (2) though its still not quite right for my level of idiocy.
   

There are things I really want to do in TW. I can explain what I want them to look like and how they should work. But I am having great difficulty doing them or getting precise enough support. And that is NOT JUST from lack documentation. It is because, though I am a genius in my fields of expertise, on programming I come before the Neanderthals. AND I have ABSOLUTELY NO INTEREST in trying to become a programmer. It wastes my time & everyone else's I end up having to nudge to move me feebly forward. There has to be more to life than that :-)

In my fantasy is the idea ... that a person, like me, who knows WHAT they want but has no grasp of HOW to do it PAYs a fee to receive structured help & precisely matched code to create a TW incrementally. That process could be documented. Those cases might help?

Best wishes

Josiah

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Hi Josiah,

What do you want to do? And how much money do you have? 

:)

Regards,

Richard

[Josiah]

Hi Richard

I'm currently writing specs. It will likely take me a week to finish yet as I'm trying to be as clear as possible.

Money is available. Pricing we'd need to haggle a bit :-)

Best
Josiah

[Mark S.]

Gosh, I thought everyone loved programming. My theory is that in the future everyone will be a programmer, even if it's only "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot".

I've waded through many detailed programming examples in various languages. The thing is, unless it exactly matches the thing you want to do, there is almost always a serious omission. Somebody could write a detailed use case, but it still might not help you. There's just too many use cases that people can come up with.

It might be better to take the other approach and simply lay out what you want to do. Then maybe someone could write up documentation based on your use case, or explain why it couldn't be done, or make a bid.

Mark

[c pa]

Mat says

>> What makes this one different from the previous initiatives from other people?

Nothing

>> What would make it successful

Success = helps me. This is an exercise in setting things up so in 5 years I can dig out old code and use it

>> IMO the faint blue font color is difficult to see when white background.

Changed the pallette to dark
>> possible to get tooltips
That's advanced stuff for a use-case I haven't developed
>> The blue line ... The red dot ...
Took me hours to make that work. Yeah it sucks. That's one of the apps I'll be documenting. Once the documentation is done ... you folks can improve it and point to the results so I can use it too.
>> navigation pills
Called that because that is the name of the macro that generates the blue lines. I'll change the docs to call them blue lines

Jeremy says

>> talking about documentation improvements: http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywikidocs

Ah ha. Excellent. Lots of requests for things

Josiah says

>> The re-creation of the wheel

That's what I'm doing. My wheel will be rounder

>> concrete demonstration of END RESULTS

The direction I'm going but I haven't yet developed the standard structure with which to manage those demonstrations. If you look at [[crazyListHere]], that's my starting point. I've messed around with some fields and using $:/ and I'll probably end up putting each macro in a separate tiddler with standard field names to hold standard macro documentation components and then write other macros to use that structure to generate slides ... or tooltips ... or something

>> active TRAINING modules on the different facets of TW that are dealt with through DETAILED USE CASES.

Ahhh ok so this requires yet another structure to be developed

>> In my fantasy is the idea ...

Ya mine too

Mark says
>> Somebody could write a detailed use case ... There's just too many use cases
Actually I've found that the generalized use cases tend to be bounded. The trick is to develop the methodology to lead the user to their particular use-case with a different methodology to combine cases to address more granular needs. Then identify outliers which can be added to the standard pile. To get there requires some technology not currently in TW but folks seem to be working on it

[Josiah]

Ciao Mark S,

I can see you have ordered a few too many Earl Grey's at The Foo Bar. :-)

Use Cases IMO, and experience, are a fundamental method of engendering broader understanding. Specifics instantiate rules in a way that non-experts can better grasp.

Obviously people have different styles of learning, according to where they are. Basically, broadly, full experts can work from general principles TO realization, whilst non-exerts can work from specific cases TO begin to grasp general principles.

FYI, I learnt to edit film in the immensely complex Adobe Premiere purely by use cases. Just looking in the documentation did nothing for me.

Best wishes
Josiah

[Josiah]

Ciao c pa

Its good you doing it. In particular I realized you are clear about the background situation ... so hopefully your ...

>> wheel will be rounder

... and at least ...

>> so in 5 years I can dig out old code and use it

Formats of HOW to present learning material matter. But are not so easy as they might first appear. And its a bit of a Catch-22 in that one oneself does not yet know enough about how to actually DO them.

>> I haven't yet developed the standard structure with which to manage those demonstrations

Being more positive about it, though, maybe one idea is to use iframes in a TW. Idea being the use case explained in the "mother", and the code needed is presented, NEXT TO the example of the WORKING RESULT in an iframed "daughter". This done for EACH STEP. Just an idea. But the direct demonstration of the "evolution" of solutions sees to me a helpful, and fairly manageable approach.

Best wishes
Josiah

[Josiah]

Ed

Just a footnote. I believe the userbase is far, far more than 15,000.  Look at this recent thread: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/tiddlywiki/g_YeDXCvZGY

Quite how high it is difficult to estimate because (1) usage (by design) is not tracked; (2) proper download analytics are not available. BUT download details for TiddlyFox are. And are interesting.

I suspect there is a large, largely silent, userbase.

Best wishes
Josiah

On Wednesday, 8 June 2016 01:42:15 UTC+2, Ed wrote:

[Raymond McDowell]

On Monday, June 6, 2016 at 10:39:12 PM UTC+8, madscijr wrote:

Just sayin'.  I would find it useful, if only the way the Dummies books are structured. 

Maybe dedicate half the book to TW Classic and half to TW 5? 

I've been hesitant to add my two cents to this discussion, but let me offer an opening statement I've developed for my version of selling/documenting/using TW

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jeremy Rustum's landmark creation, TiddlyWiki, is a cute name for a powerful, flexible and elegant tool. TiddlyWiki is great for note taking, task listing, knowledge management, project development ... well, actually for just about any content-based data you can imagine. It's free, cross-platform, easy to use out of the box and has a support community that can't be beat.

Mind you, once you start looking under the hood, there is a learning curve, but if you want to use it for a customized fusion of needs, you will want to learn how to tweak and modify it to create your own perfect working environment.  But this doesn't need to slow down your actual use of TW. The fine tuning can be done progressively, step-by-step, and you can continue to use TiddlyWiki while you learn to invoke the underlying magic that makes it so unique and so useful.

Lets get started by going to Getting Started. This is TiddlyWiki's download and basic instruction page. The most exciting aspect of this set of instructions is that you can use TiddlyWiki on every popular operating system. Even more significant, if you work on the run, you can use Dropbox, Google Drive or any other cloud based repository to sync your TiddlyWiki between all your devices.

Start by downloading the version for your operating system and your browser. I use Firefox, along with the TiddlyFox plug-in, but that's just my own preference.

Once downloaded, open up your empty TiddlyWiki in another browser tab while you keep this one available for reference. Fill out the Title and sub-title fields, remembering to use double-brackets "[[ ]]" if you use spaces between the words.

.

Got that done? Great. Just so you know, you have several options available to learn how to use TW.  You can read through Mr Rustom's instructions and learn everything you need to know and there are also several other tutorials and instruction manuals out in the wild, This just happens to be mine.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The concept is to use TW to teach people how to use TW. In addition, it encourages people to use actively TW as they go. The more they learn the more they can expand the usage. The one issue is that the project is labor intensive for the author. It requires multiple tiddlywikis, expanding the capabilities of each as new techniques and concepts are introduced with detailed step-by-step development.

I'm happy to proceed with this effort if enough people think its worthwhile. Alternately, it can be a collaborative effort and/or someone with more expertise can pick up the proverbial ball and run with it.