Thank you everyone!
For those who attended yesterday’s The Garden and the Stream IndieWebCamp session, thank you for participating! I honestly only expected 4 or 5 wiki fans to show up, so I was overwhelmed with the crowd that magically appeared from across multiple countries and timezones.
I’ve heard from many–both during the session and privately after–that it was a fantastic and wide-ranging conversation. (I never suspected memory palaces or my favorite 13th century Franciscan tertiary to be topics of discussion.) Several have suggested we host not only a continuation of the session, but that they’d be interested in other pop-up IndieWebCamp sessions. If you’re interested in future follow ups or sessions shoot me a quick email (you can find it on my home page) and I’ll be sure you get an invite. You can also follow future events via events.indieweb.org or find them in the IndieWeb’s weekly newsletter that is emailed out every Friday afternoon.
If you’re interested in hosting or suggesting other topics for future sessions, there’s a stub page on the IndieWeb wiki for doing so.
Our session went on far longer than I ever could have anticipated and I suspect we could have easily gone all day and still not touched on a fraction of all the topics we all outlined. Special thanks to the larger majority of those who were interested enough and had the free time to stay well past the hour mark and on to the end. I will say it’s nice to be able to cover so much ground and so many ideas without the threat of 5 more sessions following you.
Video and Notes
For those who missed it and are interested or those who have inquired, the video link and the notes from the session have been posted to the IndieWeb wiki.
If you write up any notes or posts about the session, do add a link to them in the IndieWebCamp Pop-Ups page under blog posts/articles or photos. If you can’t log into the wiki (with your own website), feel free to ping me with the URL and I’ll add them for you.
I’ll try to write up an organizer’s post-mortem with a few ideas about doing future sessions for others to consider. I hope to rewatch the session myself and add to the growing list of notes and thoughts about it.
Creators Challenge
Because this was just a single IndieWebCamp-style discussion session and we hadn’t specifically planned a traditional creator’s day or hack day, I did want to throw out a small challenge to those who either attended or who are interested in participating.
For most, the IndieWeb is more about creating something than just talking about it. So in that spirit, I’ll challenge everyone to spend a few hours today/tomorrow or sometime this week and create something on your website or wiki related to the session. It can be a summary of ideas, a blog post about wikis (or anything you like really), a small change you’ve always wanted on your site (a CSS improvement, adding bi-directional links to your wiki, Webmention support, etc.), or anything else you might have found interesting from the conversation. The best part is that you can choose what you create on your own site! Make something you’ll use or appreciate. Have fun!
My personal plan for the challenge is to continue some work to my TiddlyWiki to support bi-directional links using TiddlyBlink. I might also take a crack at doing some design and building work to show some incoming webmentions on my TiddlyWiki. (If anyone is interested in test-driving Mike Caulfield’s implementation of Wikity on WordPress in conjunction with Webmention, I could be game for that too!)
Once you’ve made your creation, post a link to your article or notes or make a quick 2-3 minute demo video of the new feature or write up a post about it and add them to the IndieWeb wiki page for Pop-up Session Demos. Again if you can’t log into the wiki with your own website yet, drop me a note and I’ll add them for you or you can ask for help on how to do it in the IndieWeb chat.
Thanks again everyone! I look forward to seeing what you come up with.
cc: Kailyn Nelson (t), Phil Jones (t), Brian Sholis, Jack Baty
Thank you! Looking forward to digging in.
@chrisaldrich mine’s at https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2020/04/on-wikis-blogs-and-note-taking/ (added it to the IndieWeb wiki page) Thanks for hosting!
On Wikis, Blogs and Note Taking – Interdependent Thoughts
Great! I signed up for the newsletter and will get caught up otherwise soon. Thanks for putting this information/group together!
I’ve previously written about setting up receiving Webmention for TiddlyWiki by logging into webmention.io and creating an account to delegate the receipt of the notifications.
Naturally, these notifications can be more fun for cross-site conversations if one has the ability to display the webmentions on the posts to which they relate. There are probably a number of ways of doing this, but following the TiddlyWiki advice of keeping Tiddlers as small as possible, it seemed like creating a tiddler for the response and then transcluding or embedding it into the original would be the best course of action.
At the recent Gardens and Streams: Wikis, Blogs, and UI—a pop up IndieWebCamp session there was some discussion on internal bi-directional linking in wikis, but I thought it would also be fun to show off bi-directional linking between my wiki and other websites. To do that will require displaying at least some Webmentions.
My wiki currently doesn’t have very many webmentions or incoming links, but after writing about a Bookmarklet for pasting content into TiddlyWiki, I got an email from Anne-Laure Le Cunff that she’d used some of the code to write a bookmarklet for Roam Research. Since her article didn’t send a webmention, I used Telegraph to manually force her article to send my wiki a Webmention so my account would have a record of it for the future for potential exporting or other use.
Now I’d like to display this webmention on that tiddler. Doing it automatically would be great, but I thought, since I don’t expect to receive many on my wiki that I ought to try out a manual set up to see how things might work and how I might display them if they were automated.
Since I had created that bookmarklet, I used it to copy and paste the text from Anne-Laure Le Cunff‘s website into a new tiddler. I then massaged it a bit to format it to look like a response and I’ve transcluded it into the original post under a heading of Responses.
The side benefit of doing this is that the stand alone tiddler that has the link and the context from her post also sits in my wiki as a bookmark of her post as well. As a result, I get a two-for-one deal: I get the bookmark of her post with some context I’m interested in, but my original post can now also display it as a response! Now I can also use that bookmark in other places in my website as well. If only one could do this so easily in other CMSes?!
I’ve yet to hear of another example of this in the wild, so unless I’m missing something, this may be the first displayed Webmention on a TiddlyWiki in the wild.
Next steps
Data formats
TiddlyWiki has lots of ways to display data in Tiddlers, so perhaps one might use various fields in a bookmark tiddler to create the necessary comment display. This could give a more standardized method of displaying them as well. It could be particularly useful if someone was using a microformats parser to import the data of such mentions. If this were the case, then the tiddler that is being commented on could do a filter/search for all tiddlers in the wiki that mention it and transclude the appropriate pieces in a list format with the appropriate mark up as well as links back to the individual tiddlers and/or the links to the sending site.
I’m curious if others have ideas about how to best/easiest implement the display portion of webmentions on a public TiddlyWiki? Since I’m also hosting my entire TiddlyWiki on GitHub pages, there might be other potential considerations if I were to be hosting it statically instead. This may require some experimentation.
I’ve got a few mental models about how one might implement showing Webmentions in TiddlyWiki, but it may take some more thinking to figure out which way may be the best or most efficient.
Automation
I don’t anticipate a lot of incoming webmentions to my wiki at present, but if they become more prevalent, I’ll want to automate the display of these notifications somehow. This will take some thought and coding as well as more knowledge of the internals of TiddlyWiki than I’ve currently got. If someone with the coding chops is interested, I could probably brainstorm a set up fairly quickly.
Microformats
It would also be nice to be able to have full microformats support in TiddlyWiki so that the stand alone “bookmark” mention works properly, but also so that the transcluded version might have the correct mark up. This may rely on the two things to be properly nested to make them work in both contexts.
Syndicated copies:
Digging into the differences between wikis and blogs #indieweb
Syndicated copies:
People have written some interesting things following on from the pop-up IndieWebCamp that Chris Aldrich organised a couple of weeks ago. The Garden and the Stream set out to compare and contrast wikis and weblogs and how the two might be used. It was a terrific success, and I’m sorry I wasn’t able to be there. The topic interests me and is something I’ve thought about on and off for a long time. This morning, I treated myself to thinking about it some more.
I didn’t watch the recording of the session, but I did spend some time going through the notes and reflecting on bits that caught my attention. I liked Desmond’s thought that a recipe could be a wiki entry (Desmond’s recipes are), while a story about a recipe would be a blog post. I agree that the recipe might be tweaked from time to time, maybe to clarify the instructions or add optional deviations. Discovering the deviations, or adapting the recipe, or serving it on a particular occasion, would then be the blog posts.
On my bread and baking site, I don’t revise a recipe once written. If I change or tweak the recipe, that too becomes a blog post that contains a link to the original. Because the site is currently powered by WordPress, it wouldn’t be difficult to convert recipes from posts to pages, but right now I’m not yet seeing enough value in that.
Either way, though, the problem remains of informing anyone else who looked at the recipe before the changes. Is this on me, the recipe writer, or you, the recipe reader? It would be nice if Desmond could offer an option to subscribe to his recipe category, or to individual recipes. If I bring one of his recipes into my own collection, I would include the source. I could then check it manually or, if I were smarter, build something that automatically compares the current version to the version I originally linked to. My feeling is that it is up to me to keep myself informed about changes, and the best that Desmond could do is make that easier with a feed.
Atomicity and Auriculas
As a gardener, I am torn between the blowsy attractions of an English herbaceous border in all its glory, and the perfection of a single bloom. It’s a false dichotomy, of course, but the discussion on atomicity brought it to mind.
twMAT noted that TiddlyWiki says that everything should be as small as possible. And yet, a page full of, oh, I dunno, 68 good thoughts is terrifically absorbing to scroll through. Would I have got to No. 68 if I had to click from one to the next? No. So it is with notes and maybe flowers too. The smallest possible unit makes it easier to take care of each unit, but they really shine in the aggregate.
This is the principle of the zettelkasten, where each slip, or note, should ideally contain a single idea. The method’s strength is then is to allow those ideas to be chained together in different ways. I’ve not been very good at that, and I acknowledge that I am more of a hoarder than a curator when it comes to my zettelkasten, which only became one after I migrated from nvALT to The Archive a couple of years ago. Too often, when I go through my notes, I discover that I just copied a chunk of someone else’s ideas into my slip, unfiltered, unprocessed, and unlinked to any other thought.
Nevertheless, the very fact that I am going through my notes reflects a new habit I am trying to build, of setting time aside every week, and sometimes more often, deliberately to tend the oldest notes I have and the notes I created or edited in the past week. Old notes take longer, because I have to check old links and decide what to do if they have rotted away. Those notes also need to be reshaped in line with zettelkasten principles. That means deciding on primary tags, considering internal links, splitting the atoms of long notes and so on. At times it frustrates me, but when it goes well I do see structure emerging and with it new thoughts and new directions to follow.
Unlike many of the wiki enthusiasts, at least on my reading, I have no interest in making my zettelkasten public, only the things that emerge from it.
Stones in the Garden
Anne-Laure Le Cunff raised the point that blogs are set in stone while a wiki consists of evergreen notes. That may be so, in an ideal world, and it prompts two thoughts. First, search engines do a really bad job of indicating the age of any web page. This is especially true for blog posts, and when you are looking to solve a problem it can be a real annoyance. Secondly, the evergreen nature of a wiki means that as it grows it casts bits of itself into the shade; some pages do just get neglected, not by design but by accident. As noted, I’m trying to overcome this by setting time aside specifically to expose older notes, but I’m sure that as the number of notes goes up, so the return time to any given note increases until it may as well be set in stone.
Aside: I read Stacking the Bricks: How the Blog Broke the Web — undated, natch — with a knowing sense of been-there-done-that, because it is true. I built web pages by hand for a newsletter I used to publish physically. The pages had an image-mapped table that let you read past issues. For each new issue, I updated every file, by hand. I often made mistakes. So when I discovered NucleusCMS in 2001 or 2002 I was primed and ready to go. It changed my professional life entirely. But I’m still writing and publishing on the web in the way I always have: as dated pieces presented in reverse chronological order, even in filtered presentations. If there’s one takeaway from all this, it is that I want to think much harder about that.
The finest example I know of someone who tends their garden meticulously is Gwern Branwen. The home page is exactly what Amy Hoy would like, a table of contents, gathered under various useful headings. Each page is an extended article, with an estimate of how finished it is and various other metrics. The pages are beautifully laid out, easy to navigate, informative, astonishing. There is much there that I don’t begin to understand, and it is always a pleasure finding that out. Gwern remains an impossible lodestar for the kind of thing I now have in mind.
As it happens, I have a stream running through this, my garden. Or perhaps it is a side channel off the main river. Either way, a garden is invariably a nicer place to be when it has a water feature.
Huge thanks to everyone who contributed to the pop-up for helping me to think through some of these things. Photo of an auricula theatre by Victoria Summerley, used without permission but with credit.
I had a collection of links on wikis, thought I would collect them here:
Tom Critchlow – Building a Digital Garden: How I built myself a simple wiki using folders and files and published using Jekyll (his personal wiki)
I liked this article because it makes it possible to have a wiki without a database
Tom Critchlow – Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens – Building personal learning environments across the different time horizons of information consumption
Tom gives Twitter, blogging, and wikis as his examples for his title, also references the article below.
Mike Caufield – The Garden and the Stream: A TechnoPastoral
This 2015 article compares and contrasts wikis and blogs, with a focus on Federated Wiki (created by Ward Cunningham)
Frank McPherson – Site index page for his instance of Federated Wiki (also, his page on setting up Federated Wiki on your laptop)
Andy Sylvester – My instance of Federated Wiki (my New User Setup page)
Rudimentary Lathe – Jack Baty’s hosted instance of TiddlyWiki
TiddlyWiki – Main site to download your own copy
Chris Aldrich – Summary of Indieweb pop-up session on The Garden and The Stream (includes notes and video)