[semi off topic] Blog about note taking

[Mat]

From time to time I do a search for "tiddlywiki" and just scan to see if there's anything new.

If you, like me, are interested in the topic of "note taking" then you will like this blog that I just found:

http://takingnotenow.blogspot.se

(Yes it brings up TW in a few posts.)

<:-)

[Miroslav Kalous]

Well, for me it's quite on topic, as this blog is one of the avenues that led me to TW. I was looking for a personal knowledge base mostly for academic purposes. The author of TakingNote is also an academic.

It's interesting how our views of TW differ. The author of the blog uses ConnectedText, a proprietary app development of which seems discontinued. He dislikes TW because a change of a tiddler's name breaks all links to it.

Me, quite the contrary, would not start using CT, knowing it's just a question of time when I could have problems trying to export my data. And I don't mind what happens when you rename a tiddler. I do it rarely. And I think an easy workaround is to create a new tiddler with a new name and link it to the previous version (with emptied body). In this way, note A linked to B, which was recreated and renamed as C, is still linked to it (A -> B -> C).

That said, I enjoy the TakingNote blog very much and it has helped me plenty in thinking how to structure my notes and what app to use.

[TonyM]

Of course if the link is established with tags and other methods then renaming a tiddler is trivial.

Tony,

[PMario]

Hi,

It's interesting how our views of TW differ. The author of the blog uses ConnectedText, a proprietary app development of which seems discontinued. He dislikes TW because a change of a tiddler's name breaks all links to it.

Going a little bit off-off-topic :) ... I did create the uni-link plugin [1], that also allows you to work with "aliases". So as long as you don't change the alias, links shouldn't break. ... and instead of changing aliases, it would be easy to just add a new one. ...

There is an intro video [2] too :) 

have fun!
mario

[1] https://wikilabs.github.io/editions/uni-link/
[2] https://youtu.be/V9l-vipAoNw

[Mark S.]

Something like this is needed in the core, so the title can stop doing 3 jobs (hidden status, title, id).

-- Mark

[Mark S.]

I've looked at so many information systems, I need a personal information system just to track and remember the information systems.

My qualifications:

* Open source/non-proprietary
* Active community
* Active support
* Multi-platform (Android, Windows, Linux)
* Local data
* Images
* Client based Encryption

On at least 4 occasions I've veered from the true path and dabbled with proprietary products (TreePad, Evernote, InfoSelect, Onenote, CintaNotes, RightNote). I know technically that's more than 4, which brings me back to the point about needing a database for the note systems I've used. I only used OneNote for one project, but didn't find it's approach appealing.

Why non-proprietary? It's not about money. Not exactly. It's because proprietary systems are opaque. You don't know if your favorite product is going to be discontinued, sold, or have it's business plan revamped. I've avoided Google Keep just because there is a graveyard of products that Google has dropped over the years (https://www.wordstream.com/articles/retired-google-projects). InfoSelect changed it's business plan within one year of my purchase, increasing the suggested price by a factor of 5! If you've read the blog in Mat's link, then you'll know that the poster is having problems because his/her favorite proprietary note-taking tool might no longer supported.

There's also proprietary open source products. Those are products that (like TiddlyWiki) are non-proprietary in theory but in practice there's only one or two people maintaining them and/or know how to maintain them. This means they are in peril from the "rampant bus" problem. That is, the product is only one accident away from no longer being supported. In fact, most open source products fall under this category. This is why an active community is important.

Zim and WikidPad came very close and might be worth a second look, but they seemed to suffer from reduced support. They also don't have any real Android presence. Orgmode is interesting, but it's Android app didn't act or feel like the real thing at all. And it was too easy to merge 2 notes and mess up your data. KeepNote was nice, but it's developer went AWOL in 2012. Tomboy was great for just text and had a beautiful Android app, but for mysterious reasons there was no direct way to synch between the desktop and the app. Simplenotes is robust but your info is in the clouds. Evernote is great but they did have lay-offs, so who knows what's going on behind doors? They don't offer client side encryption, so is your data safe?

So, TW checks off most of the boxes, possibly more than any other app, though it is sometimes not as convenient as other solutions, has saving complications,  and hits performance barriers especially on mobile devices.
 
-- Mark

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Mark S...

 I've looked at so many information systems, I need a personal information system just to track and remember the information systems.

lol!

On at least 4 occasions I've veered from the true path and dabbled with proprietary products (TreePad, Evernote, InfoSelect, Onenote, CintaNotes, RightNote).

InfoSelect, the final Dos version, not the later Windows version, was stunning. Rather like TW it used "reductive search" ... i.e. you filter down results via search. However in InfoSelect the filter live reduced all the displayed records, not just titles of them. It was direct, intuitive, very fast & flexible.

If TW could be more performative its an approach that has great merit for TW in a simple "textbase" implementation like that. Very suited to multiple applications where your principal purpose is to filter to "all, but only" the fragments you need. The metaphorical model being "there are no links to click" ... rather the filter process itself is the ONLY mechanism. I think it has much, much merit.

Best wishes
Josiah

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Mark S. wrote...

So, TW checks off most of the boxes, possibly more than any other app, though it is sometimes not as convenient as other solutions, has saving complications,  and hits performance barriers especially on mobile devices.

Its becoming possible to wrap TW into installs where an executable handles all the saving problems. Such an approach, that more closely resembles normal software I think has great future potential for expanding TW uptake, at least on Desktops (though a dwindling part of the market).

I totally agree that PERFORMANCE for at-scale work--and not just on mobile devices--is a really serious issue. I'm not good enough technically to know whether TW is hitting limits in JS running in a Browser, or whether it could be tweaked further to support "at-scale" data within its current architecture.

Best wishes
Josiah

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Mat wrote:

If you, like me, are interested in the topic of "note taking" then you will like this blog ...

 http://takingnotenow.blogspot.se

Ciao Mat. Its an interesting blog. Partly because it harks back to an earlier time when "textbases" were more of a hot topic.

My interest in notetaking, and my interest in TW also, stems from by background as an anthropologist. At one time the issues fieldworkers (ethnographers) had in notating field-notes were at the cutting edge of developing these kinds of tools.

Its worth mentioning a few things that characterised the mindset of that time that are still relevant now.

-- "Textbases" were considered to be tools that combined structured data and unstructured notes in a tool that resembled a word-processer but with additional data fields you could define at will as needed (sound familiar? :-)

-- There was great concern that "pattern can emerge", not be strictured. At the time textbases emerged it was part of an effort to get away from overly "pre-structured data-slot" systems that were fine for counting bodies in Newcastle but were useless for helping an anthropologist log a funerary ritual in Somalia that, as yet, they could not understand, only observe and note.

-- Importantly they had ideas of "definable emergent structure" too. I.e. you need time to see pattern, but you can't explain it sociologically well unless you can go further and demonstrate how those patterns function empirically (say relating marriage to cow herd size amongst the Masai). This is one thing TW can do extremely well and much more usefully than most any other tool of its family type.

I could go on. But I think you get the idea. There is a long history. And its nowhere near completed yet.

Best wishes
Josiah

[Mark S.]

Perhaps with your background you could explain Zettelkasten. There seems to be an almost cult-like culture around a system of taking notes (by software or index cards). https://zettelkasten.de/ .

The idea seems to be to let ideas emerge without forcing them into slots, though I'm not sure how that happens. It looks overall to be a good match for TiddlyWiki except possibly for scalability.

-- Mark

[Mark S.]

There's no indexing system in TW, and thus no scalability. Indexed databases were able to handle hundreds of thousands of records even with 1980s hardware.

There's a way to send empty tiddlers via the server that only get populated on demand. The problem then is that your search will only see the titles and tags (fields ??) for searching. But if what you wanted was link and tag based (without depending on text searches) then it should work OK. You would need a separate (or enhanced) search box to fetch tiddlers from the server directly.

Or, maybe someone could write a system that would store an index to the current TW's text context. Then a special search would look through the index and use that for creating a list of links of tiddlers. The tiddlers would become populated when clicked on. The index would be updated on saving (harder) or on demand.

-- Mark

[Miroslav Kalous]

Hi, Josiah, a question for you: could you refer me to a resource, possibly a book (chapter), dealing with this discussion in ethnography? 

Thanks

Miroslav

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Miroslav

I highly recommend Luciano Paccagnella's Getting the Seats of Your Pants Dirty: Strategies for Ethnographic Research on Virtual Communities Its a very good, brief, piece of work. Written in 1997, still relevant. Cites sources with fidelity. It won't give you a software solution. But it gives you a brilliant overview of the problems in ethnography of what to record and how.

For more boring :-) (and not free) history of software for ethnography there is a comprehensive, detailed review from the Annual Review Of Sociology, Using Computers to Analyze Ethnographic Field Data: Theoretical and Practical Considerations, Vol. 24:477-498, 1998. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.soc.24.1.477

Best wishes
Josiah

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Miroslav

You may wonder why I'm quoting work from the late 90's. The answer is simple. There has been virtually no significant development in ethnographic software approaches since then. ALSO, after around 2000, normal software began to be able to do what ethnographers needed so demand for specialist approaches fell.

I'm sure that in the future we'll demand more again. Currently lacking are tools for ethnographers to be able to slowly evolve network diagrams of social relationship, for instance.

Best wishes
Josiah