Space management

[rakugo]

I now have 49 spaces that I am a member of. It is becoming a pain in
the arse to find certain spaces in the backstage tab.

I figured life would be easier if I could tag spaces. It's been on my
mind for a while now and since the situation was becoming unbearable I
decided to try and solve it for myself.

The solution I have come to is I have made a macro called
<<MySpaces>>. Instead of formatting a list as in the spaces tab on the
backstage it shows the SiteIcon and the link to all the spaces I am a
member of.

The clever bit (and the convention I am proposing) is for each of
those spaces it looks for a special tiddler called SiteInfo (named to
be consistent with SiteIcon). SiteInfo is basically a tiddler where I
can explain the purpose of my space and give it tags.

The MySpaces macro will currently look at just the tags of the
SiteInfo tiddler. It will know let me filter my list of spaces via
that tag. Clicking on tags filters the list so that I see a view of
spaces with just those tags. Clicking them again removes the tag from
the filter mechanism. Instantly I can start managing my spaces better.

So create a copy of this plugin to have a play and let me know what
you think:
http://jon.tiddlyspace.com/MySpacesPlugin

[FND]

I was hoping someone would come up with such a proposal - yay!

> life would be easier if I could tag spaces

Indeed.

> I have made a macro called <<MySpaces>>

I like!

> The clever bit (and the convention I am proposing) is for each of
> those spaces it looks for a special tiddler called SiteInfo (named to
> be consistent with SiteIcon). SiteInfo is basically a tiddler where I
> can explain the purpose of my space and give it tags.

I approve.
Note that in this model, the authors (space members) control the
metadata. I think that's okay - one could imagine a third-party plugin
allowing users to override those defaults (e.g. via systemSpace tiddlers
in the respective user's home space).

I assume that eventually, the SiteInfo tiddler's body will be used to
provide a description (and perhaps a summary slice for use in the overview)?

> It will know let me filter my list of spaces via that tag.

This reminds me of Tagsplorer (shameless plug):
http://fnd.lewcid.org/misc/TagsplorerDemo.html

It'd be nice to have a generic widget to easily apply this kinda
functionality to any type of collection - whether spaces, tiddlers,
plugins, bags etc.
(One could argue this is what TiddlyWiki's wizards are for, but I'm not
a huge fan of those... )

-- F.

[Ben Gillies]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 10:54 AM, FND <FN...@gmx.net> wrote:

I was hoping someone would come up with such a proposal - yay!

> life would be easier if I could tag spaces

Indeed.

+1

 

> The clever bit (and the convention I am proposing) is for each of
> those spaces it looks for a special tiddler called SiteInfo (named to
> be consistent with SiteIcon). SiteInfo is basically a tiddler where I
> can explain the purpose of my space and give it tags.

I approve.

I'd rather use the GettingStarted tiddler for this purpose (as it's the default tiddler that shows on startup).

 

I assume that eventually, the SiteInfo tiddler's body will be used to
provide a description (and perhaps a summary slice for use in the overview)?

I'd have thought this would be the default anyway. Such a thing would be useful for providing descriptions in Jons "theme" space without having to abuse the following mechanism, and for providing descriptions in the "spaces" space that I hacked together.

At the moment, I find the interface rather confusing. I'd rather see a fancy list type view (instead of a tile view), with a search box on top or some such and each list item consisting of the SiteIcon, a picture and a short description (the first x characters from the SiteInfo/GettingStarted tiddler).

Ben

[rakugo]

yeh I would love this to be generic but I was struggling to see a way
of doing it.
I think the key thing here is supporting templating although I'm no
sure how (although my Tiddlers macro might be of use: http://tiddlers.tiddlyspace.com/)
if we could turn the spaces into tiddlers.

Maybe the list macro could be used here and we could update the list
macro to do such templating.
<<list spaces template:x>>

Although I'm not sure how we detach things like tag filtering /
searching through the list without adding spaces as tiddlers into the
store in such a way that they do not save back to the server.

As for GettingStarted tiddler - I decided I didn't like this. As to
me, GettingStarted means get setup with the TiddlyWiki / space. The
GettingStarted tiddler in a default TiddlySpace provides handy things
such as creating a SiteIcon and changing the ColorPalette which you
wouldn't put in a SiteInfo tiddler.

Jon

On Aug 16, 11:22 am, Ben Gillies <bengill...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Ben Gillies]

As for GettingStarted tiddler - I decided I didn't like this. As to
me, GettingStarted means get setup with the TiddlyWiki / space. The
GettingStarted tiddler in a default TiddlySpace provides handy things
such as creating a SiteIcon and changing the ColorPalette which you
wouldn't put in a SiteInfo tiddler.

True if people don't change it it's not very useful. But for verticals, etc, I'd expect it to tell me about the space and how to use it, so that would be exactly the correct use case.

[rakugo]

Exactly. It gives you instructions on how to *use* the space.
Not what the space is *about*.

[PMario]

On Aug 16, 12:37 pm, rakugo <jdlrob...@gmail.com> wrote:
> As for GettingStarted tiddler - I decided I didn't like this. As to
> me, GettingStarted means get setup with the TiddlyWiki / space. The
> GettingStarted tiddler in a default TiddlySpace provides handy things
> such as creating a SiteIcon and changing the ColorPalette which you
> wouldn't put in aSiteInfotiddler.

There should be a link to SiteInfo tiddler and a short description,
what it does in the default GettingStarted tiddler.
-m

[Tobias Beer]

Hi Jon,

Is SiteInfo now the official way to go, or would that be a custom
solution for your MySpacesPlugin?

On the other hand, it were nice, if MySpacesPlugin was in it's own
space so that one could include it as a single plugin without copy &
paste.

Cheers, Tobias.

[Tobias Beer]

Hi Jon,

I think it were good if the way themes are listed would change
accordingly ...only showing spaces for which the SiteInfo tidler is
tagged 'theme', instead of having a 'themes' tiddler with a tag of
'follow'.

Cheers, Tobias.

[PMario]

hm. .. thinking ..
For me a tiddler "themes" tagged follow explicitely expresses, that I
want to follow "themes" space. So themes space can use it.
A tiddler "SiteInfo" tagged "asdf" expresses that I want to sort it
<<list filter[tag[asdf]]>>
..thought..

[rakugo]

I think I'm going to side with Tobias on this one. I think the tags do
belong in SiteInfo for things such as following.
I see the SiteInfo tiddler as being how you would describe your space
**in public** to another person who has not discovered it before. It's
the TiddlySpace equivalent of running through a library naked so
people notice you... or some other better analogy.

Hence a tag "asdf" might be a little confusing for a user as it only
means something in you the space's owner world. I would imagine the
community would choose tags to mean different things - ie. a theme tag
as you say might represent a theme, or maybe the community might
decide to use the tag include-theme or system-theme instead to make it
more obscure. I might contact you and ask you to tag your SiteInfo
tiddler with some tag that I think would be useful to me and others.

I imagine that in your own spaces it would be possible to override the
SiteInfo tiddler somehow. So for instance if the themes space has a
SiteInfo tiddler tagged themes and collection, as a user might want to
tag it with favourite. For this I could imagine creating a tiddler
called "themes" with tag favourite. Likewise if I am a member of the
themes space I might want to tag it with todo to remind me to update
it. This is not useful for the public but is for me so I might tag the
themes tiddler with todo.

So now the MySpaces plugin might be written to ignore SiteInfo
tiddlers where you have a tiddler in your space with that name. Does
that make sense? You could also imagine in future variants of the
MySpaces plugin such as TheirSpaces which take a tag and do the same
for MySpaces to spaces I am not a member of
<<TheirSpaces favourite>> for instance would be all my favourite
spaces.

I forgot to say the MySpaces plugin and other useful space related
plugins are in http://myspaces.tiddlyspace.com/

I've been holding back on adding things to the GettingStarted tiddler
and making it "more official" as I wanted to check as a community we
are agreed this is the way to go (and discover it is useful through
use) before introducing yet another new convention :)
Jon

[Jeremy Ruston]

Another convention for tagging spaces could just be to have a public
tiddler defined with an appropriate name.

For instance, defining the public tiddler "spacetagSomeTag" would mean
that the tag "SomeTag" had been applied to the space.

Cheers

Jeremy

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Jeremy Ruston
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