Hi all I just wanted to say thank you to all who have helped me lately with answers to my various questions.
I wanted to create a system whereby I can add snippets (quotes, observations) and tag them by topic, on a wide variety of topics, and publish them as I update them, in a way that is easy for my target audience to view on mobile quickly, navigate easily, download, print all, or print select pages, and share links to individual tiddlers. I knew there had to be a TiddlyWiki way of creating an expanding list of "quotes and notes by topic" that could be consulted easily in all the ways just mentioned. I ran into a number of hurdles along the way: - I knew a lot of my material would be quotes added one by one to topics, rather than finished articles. So I didn't want my readers to have to spend too much time getting to a topic before realizing I only have one note or quote. - TiddlyWikis are not very mobile-friendly, as they are chock full of shadow tiddlers, and also when holding a mobile device vertically, the sidebar is what becomes visible and the content gets shoved out of sight. - My many, many attempts to use list filters in viewtemplate tiddlers to display lists of the contents of tiddlers tagged with topic x led to dead ends. The complex list filters slowed TiddlyWiki way down at times once I started adding a lot of material. - The nature of TiddlyWiki means that people who don't know your mental system might not find the best morsels of content hidden in your file - Customizing to print an entire file in TiddlyWiki as a syllabus was a chore. - Having too many files means users having to check them all to see what I updated, and for me, it meants switching back and forth between files when all I want to do is take notes on what I am reading. - Having too few files means bigger files, and requires users having to dig way into them to see if the section they are interested in was updated recently. - People who aren't both tech savvy and familiar with TiddlyWiki will get confused by it or distracted by the nonessentials if it is not simplified in some way. I have found my 'sweet spot' by creating special TWs that I use to generate static HTML files and PDFs. The pdfs are huge, especially if images are involved, and I only put them out for those readers who want a more familiar, conventional type of document. The static HTMLs are what I am excited about. I thought I would share my results and process for those who might be interested. - Here is a static HTML I have created: http://recursos.giffmex.org/abc/mente.html (Spanish) - Here is a link to the TW I used to create it: http://www.giffmex.org/experiments/mente.html (Spanish) The key ingredients were: - Figuring out how to display certain tiddlers before others when "exporting all" to the static HTML. My less than graceful but completely adequate (for me) solution involved using periods at the beginning of tiddler titles to force them to the top. - Figuring out how to allow users to navigate between tiddlers and get back to the top quickly in a static HTML. Solutions: list links by tag in a table of contents at the top; titles as links; a home button in each tiddler - Figuring out how to make each page print separately in both HTML and PDF. Solution: page breaks at the top of each tiddler (see $:/.giffmex/pagebreak) - Figuring out how to quickly open all tiddlers in order to print to PDF (except a few instructions tiddlers specific to the html version). I scraped together the button in $:/.giffmex/OpenAllForPrintingPDFs. - Figuring out how to move quickly between files on 40 different topics. Solution: Bookmark folder and subfolders in my web browser (Firefox). - Figuring out how to let readers know about new updates to the files. I already use a Facebook group to alert people there to updates, but I also created an index (Spanish, and still in process) here: http://recursos.giffmex.org So now my process is: - Add new content and tag it by topic - If the topic is not listed in the table of contents, add it (a quick copy, paste and alter) - Note in a notebook which files I added new content to this week - At the end of the week, - Create a static HTML of each file with one click and upload them. - Open all tiddlers of each file with one click, print to PDF, and upload it. - Change the date of the most recent update for each file in Wordpress - Let people know on Facebook, if the changes are significant enough to merit mentioning I suppose my project is kind of unique, a wide ranging, expanding knowledgebase to be populated primarily by short tidbits but also with some tables and full articles, so I don't know just how applicable or relevant most people would find this. But I hope this might be helpful reference for anyone who might think about doing something similar and doesn't want to have to go through everything I did. Blessings! -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/cab8cb9e-7394-415a-bdb8-cd869243b382%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
