Share your favorite TiddlyWiki workflow

[David Gifford]

Hi all

One benefit of watching Soren's video on TiddlyWiki was seeing his workflow, which was so different from mine. I would be interested in hearing what workflows people have for doing things in TiddlyWiki, and any tweaks they use to fine tune those workflows.

I will share two, to get the conversation started:

1. I clone editor toolbar buttons to create new buttons that I use to insert things, like a link to the tiddler for the source I am reading currently, e.g., [[@|AntiFragile (Taleb)]]. I do the same to wrap things like <span class=""> and </span>. That way when when I am taking notes on a book, I paste the source after my note and add the page number. Or when I am adding CSS like indentation, font color, etc, I wrap with the span class and type the class I am applying. An app like PhraseExpress is another way to do this, and I have experimented with it.

2. I now have a setup I call BLT that shows backlinks, links and tags in the sidebar, which makes it easy to navigate to related content, even while in editing mode, and easy to read related content in the sidebar while not losing my place in the current tiddler. So I am taking notes on a book in the story river in edit mode, but have a list of all the links, backlinks and tags off to the side to read right there or open to edit. I took some notes with this setup over the last couple of days, and wow, I like it a lot.

What are some of your workflows? Mine are about note-taking, but maybe yours are about other uses of TiddlyWiki? I would really love to learn from all you pros here. Blessings.

[Lin Onetwo]

Hi David,

What does [[@|AntiFragile (Taleb)]] mean? I make use of custom buttons too, I use

<fieldset>
    <legend>Fast add</legend>
    <$button>
        <$action-sendmessage $message="tm-new-tiddler" title=<<now "YYYY-MM-DD">> tags="Thought" />
     Add new thought
    </$button>

</fieldset>

About your 2, how do you add backlinks, links and tags to the sidebar? I'm only adding it to the bottom of the view template.

Thanks

LinOnetwo

[si]

Hi David,

Its great seeing how other people use TW, I would love to see more posts like yours (or video demos).

My workflow for reading is probably closer to the one that Soren shows in his demo. Very similar to the Zettlecasten/'How to take Smart Notes' approach.

I add tiddlers for books and articles that I want to read, along with a 'priority' field with a value from 1-100. This acts as subjective indication of how worthwhile it will be to spend time on that particular source.

Then I generate a big list of sources, sorted by priority. When I want to read something I glance at the list and pick anything from the list that I am attracted to in that moment. Since the list is sorted by priority I am mostly going to be seeing stuff of high value, but I allow myself to scroll down if there is nothing of interest.

When I am reading I capture 'fleeting notes' and flashcards. I make these notes using Streams on the tiddler for whatever source I am reading. While reading I am also trying to identify the main ideas within the source. When I notice a main idea I create a new tiddler for it (an 'Evergreen note'). This tiddler doesn't need to have any text at this point.

Once I have made fleeting notes, I want to figure out what main idea is built from them. Streams is really helpful here. I can drag and drop the nodes to try and make sense of them and build a coherent structure. Eventually they will be dragged into the relevant Evergreen note (in some ways this is similar to what Soren was doing when he excised portions of his book notes into their own tiddler). I might later rewrite these notes and collapse them into their parent tiddler using the Streams to Text plugin.

This process does not happen linearly. Because I am making flashcards, I can read just a part of a source then return to it months later without any problem. I am also moving fleeting notes to evergreen notes throughout the process - not just waiting until I have finished the source. I have begun to think of this as part of the whole process of reading.

The main problem I have with this workflow is retaining references to the original source. Once the notes get moved to their permanent home, the original context is lost. This is of secondary importance, but it would be nice to be able to retain a link back to the original source of the information. (Anyone have any tips on how to approach this?)

Anyway there's a few other parts to this workflow but that's the gist of what I do.

[David Gifford]

@Lin

[[@|AntiFragile (Taleb)]] means, a link to a tiddler of a book called Anti-fragile, written by Taleb, and hidden under an alias of @ so a long blue link doesn't distract the eye from focusing on the text of the note.

Nice button!

Adding backlinks, tags and links to the sidebar:

1. See it in action here: https://giffmex.org/experiments/l+bl.nt1.eng.html#Mark%2012.1-12%20notes

2. Add it to your file from here: https://giffmex.org/experiments/.blt.template.html#BLT%20usage%20and%20installation (added this just for you)

[David Gifford]

@Si

1-100 seems like overkill. Wouldn't 1-5 be sufficient to rank your motivation for reading a work?

Your workflow follows good practices for reading in order to write. Very similar to what many have been suggesting, for example, Ramses Blog on his notetaking process, Tiago Forte's progressive summarization, Anne-Laure LeCunff's from collector to creator, etc.

My process is different because I take notes in order to have a well of interconnected ideas to refer to when I eventually write a sermon on a passage or topic. This is slightly different from taking notes for content when your job is to produce constant new content.

For references to the source, I use the comptext plugin, which does autocomplete of links after typing [[ . So you can filter then add the source after the note. Then I type the page #, then I use @ as an alias so that long titles to the source don't distract visually from the note. [[@|This is a long title of a book (Author last name)]] looks like @.

If you use the BLT setup I described to Lin OneTwo above, you will be able to see links, backlinks and tags next to your tiddler. The only issue is that because you use Streams, the backlinks are not to the topic tiddler or source tiddler, but to the node tiddler, e.g., Roadmap/20200610185807828. Streams 0.2 preview uses a breadcrumb menu, though, so if you go to the node tiddler, you can navigate up to the parent tiddler.

[David Gifford]

Update: I left a few tiddlers out of the BLT tag pill for dragging to your file (https://giffmex.org/experiments/.blt.template.html#BLT%20usage%20and%20installation). It is now updated as of 10:15am EST, so you can refresh your browser and you will see there are 6 tiddlers to import, not 3.

[si]

@David

>>> 1-100 seems like overkill. Wouldn't 1-5 be sufficient to rank your motivation for reading a work?

I like to set priorities with a slider without worrying too much about the exact value, so that was the range I picked somewhat arbitrarily just to keep the slider feeling smooth. I'm tempted to give a couple of other reasons for using the large range, but they're probably just post hoc rationalisations.

>>> For references to the source, I use the comptext plugin, which does autocomplete of links after typing [[ .

I like this option, though I think I would use a macro or template instead of vanilla links so I can distinguish a note that contains information from a source from a note that just refers to a source. The reason I'm a little unsure about this is that because I'm taking lots of little notes from the same source, it might get tedious having to add a reference each time, even with autocomplete.

Other options I'm considering:

• Just transcluding the note into it's evergreen home, so it is ultimately still stored with the original source.
• Adding a link or tag to the evergreen note. Then it will be shown as a backlink which I can use as a reference when writing these "main idea" notes. This will result in the information being duplicated, but I'm not sure that that is necessarily a bad thing.

Any thoughts?

>>> If you use the BLT setup I described to Lin OneTwo above, you will be able to see links, backlinks and tags next to your tiddler. The only issue is that because you use Streams, the backlinks are not to the topic tiddler or source tiddler, but to the node tiddler, e.g., Roadmap/20200610185807828

Yep I already do something very similar (minus the links). It's not too hard to make a template that recognises streams tiddlers and provides a link to the parent tiddler rather than the specific node.