Truce declared in Tiddlywiki struggle
Well, that’s a relief.
Al is off in Mexico, so I’m being more verbose than usual over social media because I am trapped in this house with myself, a list of a few things I ought to be doing, and plenty of discretionary time.
Today I went on a small posting tear over last night’s movie (The Caine Mutiny, 1954) and that led to a cascade of other thoughts, all dutifully dropped into a Mastodon thread that I immediately thought better of, but will allow to stand. The nice part about self-destructing toots is that nothing remains regrettable for long.
But I thought “I wish I’d just written that stuff down somewhere else,” because there are things in there that are part of a broader thesis I’ve been worrying at for a while, and I hate the tightrope walk of saying partially thought-through things in public.
So I thought about my Obsidian vault but realized how purpose-made to work it is. I thought about a second Obsidian vault and that would probably be perfect, but no fun. I picked Obsidian for work because it strikes the right balance of free-form text and enough task management stuff that I can do the thing I like to do there, which is make in-line tasks in my notes. It is also sort of dull.
Then I thought “you sort of have a commonplace book in DayOne,” but DayOne is a Mac and iOS thing, and I have exported it but not found a home for it. (Yes, there’s a web option now. I don’t know how I feel about that, because I don’t own that server.)
… and there’s Tiddlywiki, which is super compelling, but wasn’t super compelling for my work notes bakeoff. I needed to set up too much too quickly, and there are things it does not want to do, or that it can do but I do not want to figure out. But it seems fun and simple, and something about it is very compelling even if it wasn’t quite right for how I’d like to use a tool for work. Different headspaces, I guess, and I like the idea of supplementing the boundaries between headspaces through the subtle effects of tools.
So I blew up my half-started Tiddlywiki and started afresh with something I think will meet my needs:
- Daily pages are titled by ISO 8601 (2024-02-24)
- Daily pages have a “log” heading
- Daily pages have a “made today” section (
<<list-links filter:"[sameday:created{!!created}!is[system]]">>)
Those are the out-of-the-box things.
I added two plugins:
- Shiraz. It has a node explorer that drops a table with backlinks, transclusions, and common tags at the bottom of a note.
- Stickies. Select some text, hit the keystroke, and the text becomes an inline todo that shows up by filename under a tab in the sidebar. Perfect for “this reminded me of something, I want to get back to it, here’s a reminder and a link back”
Seems like a good foundation, addreesses a hangover I had from shifting away from Mac for so much day-to-day stuff.