Wiki writing philosophy.

[Shay Shaked]

I apologize in advance if this is going to sound like a huge rant. Because it probably will be. 

I've used TW for two years, and for the most part, it has been my journal. I've created a style guide and image macro to help me with that, and things have been good. I write three-four times a week or so, year round, and I am not completing my second year. I have a long list of tiddlers loaded with journal notes, and a media library with images and even self-recordings which I grew to like. 

Thing is, this is not exactly what a wiki is supposed to be, to me. I know, I know, it is what you make of it, and if that's a good usage that I feel comfortable with, what's the problem, right? Well, I'm about to publish my TW on my website again, and it occurred to me that the technical notes (those I can actually post) also tend to be personal, and long, and rant-like. The reason I wanted to put a wiki up is so I have a recording of the technical things I've been doing (mostly tech related), and share it with the world... but you see, it's the idea of it that I think I've done, not the actual thing. 90% of the wiki is all personal journal notes. 

I went back and read a couple of pages back in tiddlywiki.com. I found a couple of tools I wasn't aware of, but the website itself is not built in a way that makes sense to me. I am not sure why. I find interesting bits of information and tools, but I find that I happen to stumble upon them and not get to them naturally. I like the general philosophy, pretty KISS-like, and I want to adopt something of the sort... not sure how though. 

Is there anyone here who uses TW to record technical information? Technical documents? Something you can share? I'm interested in the style, and the meta-information level, as in, what do you do and why do you do it and how does it make sense to you. I feel a bit lost, not in a scary way, but I do want my Wiki to start being more technical. For example, I recorded the "recipe" for my newest site as a category.  You know, things like what colors I used, what CSS edition I've added and why, etc. With that, I suddenly had a good document to compare other notes to. It can be anything really; how to tie shoes, how to make the bed, what is my cleaning routine... So again, do you guys do anything like that with TW? 

Thanks for reading!  

[Diego Mesa]

Hello Shay,

I use TW as my entire external brain! That means I have a tag for "Personal"  and "Research" (which is technical). So my journal entries are all tagged with Journal, as well as either Research or Personal. I also keep bits of math, code-snippets, and journal paper notes in my TW with appropriate tags. 

I make extensive use of lists to group things together. For example, my "Research Journal" tiddler is:

<$list filter="[tag[Research]tag[Journal]!sort[created]]">
<h2><$link><$transclude field="title" mode="block"/></$link></h2>
<$transclude field="text" mode="block"/> <div class="myback-top">
<$link to="Research Journal"><i class="fa fa-chevron-up" aria-hidden="true"></i></$link>
</div>
<br/><hr/>
</$list>

My "Papers of Interest" Tiddler is:

!! Health
<dl><$list filter="[tag[PoI]tag[EHR]!nsort[touched]]" template="$:/.dm/templates/list-summary-prioritize"/></dl>


!! General
<dl><$list type="dl" filter="[tag[PoI]!tag[EHR]!nsort[touched]]" template="$:/.dm/templates/list-summary-prioritize"/></dl>

where PoI is Papers of Interest, and touched is a field I use to keep papers Ive recently come across floated to the top. 

Let me know if you'd like to discuss more!

Diego

[Shay Shaked]

Interesting. How does it get sorted by a customized field? What does it mean?

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[Diego Mesa]

I accrue many more papers than I have time to read. So, I have a "touched" field, representing the last time I came across this paper "in the wild". This could be a recommendation, a reference, etc. This is something I've always wanted in Mendeley, Zotero, etc and I am so happy to be able to implement it myself  in TW.

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[Mark Kerrigan]

Treat external files as individual tiddlers.

This allows you to write about [[CSS Template|example-template.css]], then on the example-template.css tiddler, you can have a link to the file. For simplicity, have a reference folder in the same directory of your TiddlyWiki to hold miscellaneous files can be good. You could then write

[[View file|reference/example-template.css]]

and then perhaps you might expand more on the file in question.

You can also then do things with the list-links macro such as <<list-links "[suffix[.css]]">> to view all of your css files. 

Deciding on a consistent file naming convention (and documenting about it in your TiddlyWiki) would also be helpful. 

[Shay Shaked]

So if I get you correctly, each file has a toddler to describe it, and then you can look up the description tiddlers?