The slogan of the Perl programming language was (is) "There's More Than One Way To Do It" and I've been interested to see how true that is in Tiddlywiki! There have been a couple instances recently where I've had the fun of doing something in more than one way, and being glad there's more than one way to do it. Often there's an easy peasy way and a more complicated and thorough way, and it's not always obvious which is the best; different ones may be best for different people.
For example, at work I keep a TW for my own notes and basically have my own "ticketing" system (parallel to the official one) where I keep track of tickets and tasks from my own point of view. One of the things I have in there is a "todo" system, where you can quickly add "todos" to a ticket. My first version of it was incredibly simplistic! I created a macro called <<todo-box>> which took one parameter. It would create a checkbox which was checked only if a tag with the name "todo-(parameter)" did not exist. For example, <<todo-box 1>> gave you a box which was checked if there was no todo-1 tag. You'd uncheck the box after creating it and you'd now have the "todo-1" tag on your task tiddler. Finish the todo, check the box, and the tag disappears. (I liked the idea of tags disappearing as you finish things up.) Now that I know TW a lot better, I created a system where there's an entry box at the bottom of the tiddler, which creates "todo" sub-tiddlers tagged with the original tiddler title, and lets you check them as done, rearrnage them, delete them, click through to them and modify the text, etc. It's pretty cool, it didn't take me that long to create, but I never would have known how to do it a couple months ago when I created the original todo-box macro which preceded it. And I still love the fact that the original was so easy. Another example: a friend of mine is going to run a game of Dungeons & Dragons, and I wanted to make a tiddlywiki to hold my character. (I know that resources for this already exist, but I wanted to roll my own.) I have two completely different versions of it. My first, "naive" version is a tiddlywiki which is just for one character, and pieces of the character exist as tiddlers. The Strength score is a tiddler called Strength. Things like that. You couldn't put more than one character in this TW cause it's not designed for that, the character sprawls all over the global namespace. But the beautiful thing about this is its simplicity! Everything's editable just as tiddlers if you want it to be. There's no complex interface, very simple transclusion and stuff is enough to make the whole thing editable. The second version I did, a single tiddler (well, a single tiddler and possibly some tagging sub-tiddlers) represents all the info for a character. Strength is a field. All the stuff is fields. It's not as easy to pull info out of it and display it or make it editable. It's not quite as easy to edit it in place (though you can of course always edit the fields on a tiddler, so it's not THAT hard). It took more work to do this, but it's pretty cool, in that I could theoretically keep as many characters as I wanted in there and display them individually. Technically the second version is way more sophisticated than the first -- it's analogous to a professional programmer using data structures rather than a naive programmer using globals everywhere -- and yet.... I kinda like the first one better. It was way easier to throw together. It would be way easier to tweak and modify. The code is less complex. It's more "just vanilla tiddlywiki" and less "stuff added on top of a tiddlywiki." Obviously if I needed a thing where I could have more than one character in the TW, I'd go for the second. I am really glad it's possible! But I think I"m going to stick with the naive one. I think it has a bit more tiddlywikiness, in that it's simple and prefers to hold information in tiddlers rather than fields. Anyways, I love that the different ways are possible. I've learned a lot about TWs by doing things the most simple naive way possible first and then moving up in sophistication and complexity.... and sometimes even moving back down again because I prefer the naive way! Just wanted to share that aspect of my appreciation of TW. :) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tiddlywiki+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/a6ec4fdb-2604-472f-8e68-6e0d5ec3c5fbn%40googlegroups.com.
