Creativity revival, and documentation idea

[David Gifford]

Just a word of thanks to everyone who has been creating all this good stuff recently for TiddlyWiki: details, presentations, next/previous navigation, tweets, family trees, etc etc, my list of Firefox bookmarks of things to experiment with later in TiddlyWiki is getting full. Fun time to be into TiddlyWiki, and I hope it really takes off this time. Every time people start talking about documentation, I start wishing I had more time and energy, so I could do a TW5 version of TiddlyWiki for the rest of us, or a few tutorials on setting up a TiddlyWiki for this or that use case.

One idea for documentation might be to have popups, in tiddlywiki.com only, not on empty.html, that overlay each shadow tiddler when it is opened, and explain it:

"You just opened the shadow tiddler $:/tags/ViewTemplate. The list field of this tiddler controls the order in which items are shown when a tiddler is in view mode. For example, a tiddler's tags are viewed below the tiddler title but above the contents of the tiddler.

To rearrange the position of existing items, edit $:/tags/ViewTemplate and reorder the items in the list field to your liking. If you create a custom tiddler with the tag $:/tags/ViewTemplate, and would like to control where it appears on tiddlers in view mode, insert that tiddler's title in the appropriate place of the list field of the tiddler $:/tags/ViewTemplate. If that tiddler's title is more than one word, you will need to enclose the title with double brackets [[ ]].

Be aware that any changes that TiddlyWiki makes to this shadow tiddler in the future will not be applied to your altered version of it. Also, by altering this tiddler, it will now appear in the list of systems tiddlers (Sidebar > More tab > System tab)

(X) Close this explanation"

I have a feeling that doing this would bloat tiddlywiki.com. Perhaps there could be a tiddlywiki.com/tutorial.html with this kind of thing in it. Just a thought.

Blessings to everyone,

Dave

[Josiah]

the whole "documentation" thing is interesting. and frustrating. 

your ideas here say something important. 

in my mind (now) saying what "IT" is that is actually needed is actually quite difficult. There seem to be several levels.

1 - The "missing MANUAL" (aka hopes that Eric Shulman might get to a point be could publish one before my beard hits the floor :-)

2 - TRACKING. You are Absolutely Right that in the last few months there has been ENORMOUS innovations with TW. But the Google Group fog settles settles quickly and unless you are noting them at the time it treats everything the same and its a swamp that eats it all unless you downloaded things quick. This is a lot to do the fact its a really blunt instrument once something is not under active discussion.

3 - SHOWCASES. This is likely closest to what would help my cognitive style. I learn most from seeing FULL working TW's, not minimalist demos. I think its an area that is particularly weak.

4 - Your IN CONTEXT idea is interesting. But I don't think its workable for the main site. Not least because Mr JR does not, I think rightly, want to get too distracted by the burden of end-user oriented documentation. As far as I read that site its about fundamental logics. Parts of it are naive-user friendly, much of of it isn't and probably should not be.

Just thoughts

Josiah

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Josiah

On 20 Feb 2017, at 14:57, Josiah <prog...@assays.tv> wrote:

Mr JR does not, I think rightly, want to get too distracted by the burden of end-user oriented documentation. As far as I read that site its about fundamental logics. Parts of it are naive-user friendly, much of of it isn't and probably should not be.

Just to clarify, the point I’ve made in the past is that it is the singular responsibility of tiddlywiki.com to provide authoritative reference documentation. It can have tutorial material, but there will always be a need for a multiplicity of learning tutorials aimed at different people in different situations. We can aim for completeness of the reference documentation, but we cannot achieve completeness in the tutorial documentation.

Best wishes

Jeremy