TiddlyWiki Hangout #106 with Anne-Laure Le Cunff

In this interview, Jeremy Black talks with Anne‑Laure Le Cunff, founder of NessLabs, about how her background in neuroscience and knowledge‑work led her to adopt TiddlyWiki as a "second public brain". She explains the cognitive affordances of hyperlinked notes—backlinks, manual link phrasing, and the way these structures mirror brain processes. Anne‑Laure describes her workflow for turning a local Node‑based TiddlyWiki into a static website (mentlnodes.com), covering SEO meta tags, sitemap generation, GitHub version control, Netlify deployment, and handling of build‑time file deletion. She discusses her emerging tagging strategy for future data analysis, the interstitial journaling technique she uses to capture distractions, and how she leverages Roam’s block‑level linking for drafting articles. The conversation also touches on the philosophical distinction between a digital garden and a traditional blog, the importance of edit timestamps over publish dates, and the need for backup strategies given Roam’s subscription model. Technical hiccups (Bash exclamation‑mark issue, plugin warnings) illustrate her learning curve. Throughout, Anne‑Laure emphasizes the simplicity and flexibility of hypertext tools, the discipline they impose, and the value of open‑source alternatives for long‑term knowledge preservation.
Chapters
Hi, hello, and welcome to TiddlyWiki Hangout number 106, and I'm joined today by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who's joining me from London, I believe. Hi, Anne-Laure, how are you doing?
Hey, I'm great, thanks so much for having me.
Great, so pleased that you could make it. Now, I know that you've recently discovered TiddlyWiki, but before we dive into that, just tell us a little bit about the work that you do and how perhaps that drew you towards TiddlyWiki?
Yeah, absolutely. I run a company called NessLabs where I publish articles about neuroscience, and the reason I'm doing this is because I studied neuroscience at King's College in London, and writing articles, taking these notes and sharing them with the world basically is a way for me to use kind of the generation effect and to learn better, understand the topics better and remember them better. And this is part of why I was drawn to TiddlyWiki, because I was looking for a way to store and share my notes where it would be easy to interlink concepts together.
Indeed, and I guess something I've maybe learned from reading a tiny bit of your work is that, well, neuroscience implies an interest in how the brain works, and say it's interesting for me as a software guy that I tend to think of TiddlyWiki in terms of its functionality, but I see something in the way that you talk about it which is perhaps coming at it from a completely opposite angle, really more about the affordances that it gives us.
Yes, I know there, you know, TiddlyWiki is incredibly flexible and I'm always amazed at how you can basically shape it to do whatever you want it to do. But I think I'm making mostly— I use mostly basic functionalities, which are amazing and are actually hard to find in other note-taking tools. But the— I'm going to see if I can find a note that has an example of this, but the Yeah, here, this one, for example, I installed something called TiddlyBlink, which Dave Gifford built, and it shows the backlinks, the references from other articles to the current ones. And to me, it really helps me find connections between articles that I wrote. And it feels like it's working in a very similar way to how my brain works, where instead of having a linear list of folders, I actually have all of these connections that are— that can feel messy, but actually help me in exploring different concepts and connecting them together.
So in this case, there's a link also, a link that I guess you wrote to Make It Real. Is that to a Tiddlycall Make It Real or to—
Yeah, it's, uh, it's— if you edit it, you'll see that this goes from— this goes to an internal note, actually. So if I go on this note, there will be a backlink from the notes we were just on here. And so as you can see, I am someone who spends a lot of time interlinking stuff together because this is the way I think, and I'm trying to kind of use TiddlyWiki as a second public brain.
And so to, for people who don't know this, I think this wiki that we're looking at here is currently running on your laptop, is that right? It's running locally.
Yes.
Under Node.js, but you use it to publish to a public website, and I'll add a link to mentl nodes. Is it mentlnodes.org?
Yes, it's mentlnodes.com, and that's the website that gets generated from my TiddlyWiki, the one that runs on my laptop.
And so you're— and is your— when you're looking at the wiki view, is literally every tiddler that you create will be published if you then went on to execute the publish process?
Not all of them. I have— where's my wiki here? I do have some— the ones that are tagged meta here, they're not going to get published because they're more— firstly, they are the ones that come from TiddlyBlink and And they're also some of the ones that I use more for myself to organize my topics together. And I don't think they're useful to have on the final website. So these don't get exported, but everything else does get exported to the static website.
I see. And I can see here you're using tags to indicate a kind of type of the different Do you use them as part of the content relationships of Tiddlers as well?
I only just started doing this. I'm starting a— you know, I have my notes here, and I— so this is more of a long-term project, but in like a year or so, I would love to export all of my notes from TiddlyWiki and perform some data analysis on it. This is why I'm learning Python at the moment, so I'm using tags not because they're super helpful to me right now, but because I feel like in the future, if I want to remember what kind of content is in different tiddlers and to make it easier to perform data analysis, it's going to be helpful. So to me, tagging is kind of being kind to my future self at the moment, so I'm not actively using them.
I'm interested in your— you're making a lot of manual explicit links between tiddlers. And some of them that we've seen already, the link text is different than the title of the target tiddler. And I was thinking that's quite interesting, because not only does it set up a relationship, indicate a relationship to the target tiddler, but the link text avers, if that's the word, declares a relationship to that target. So here, "make it real" implies that the target link, whatever its title, will tell us something about making it real, you know, in the context of the sentence that we've just read. So that's the sort of the original Google insight, I guess, was to look at the link text. And it's something we don't look at here, but it'd be fascinating to see for each of these references what the link text was as well, I guess, is what I'm suggesting.
Absolutely. I had a friend telling me that He thought that it was a lot of work the way I was doing it, manually assigning copy to all of these links. But actually, to me, it is part of the learning and understanding and processing process that I have. And I think it's really important that I take the time. It does take me sometimes a few seconds or a minute to figure out what is the best way to phrase this so I can organically link those two notes together because I feel like they do have a connection and I need to uncover and I need to explicitly express that connection. And I think long-term, this is what is helping me articulate the link between all of these different notes. So it's a— I think it's manual, yes, but it's a good thing to do.
And it's perhaps the difference between hypertextual writing and normal linear writing, I guess.
Absolutely. This is why, you know, this kind of experience where you can just you know, you could almost go in circles and keep on clicking and it never really ends. You wouldn't have this from a linear Google Doc, for example. I think only something like TiddlyWiki here with the backlinks and interlinking content like this will allow you to have this kind of experience where you can explore your thoughts in a nonlinear way.
It's a theme that often comes up when people over the years have talked about their experience of discovering TiddlyWiki is that they recognize in it something of the way that they think of their own brain working. And it's not really a special feature of TiddlyWiki, it's a feature of all hypertext systems, of which TiddlyWiki is only one that exhibits those features. But there is— but I certainly felt that as well when I first saw the World Wide Web. I just thought, yes, that's what I've seen here. Well, actually, probably HyperCard more, but it seems as though there's something waiting in our brains to be activated by affordances like this that let you create those links.
Yes, and this is how we learn, right? This is how memory works. And this is how you reinforce your memories by connecting new memories that you want to form to old memories, existing knowledge that you already have. Inside your brain, in your mind. And it's interesting that so few tools that pretend to be tools for thoughts that are supposed to help you think better actually don't offer this very, very simple feature, which is just helping you, you know, hypertext linking and interlinking your notes. It's a very simple feature, but it is the one quick win you can add to any tool to allow people to have an experience that is closer to the way they actually think.
Yes, yes, beautifully put. So, walk us through any other customizations here. I kind of— what I also wanted to do was, you can see here that we can kind of see the date you discovered TiddlyWiki.
Yes, absolutely, I discovered it like probably like a week before that. I had a few tests ones before going all in with this one. And this is the one I currently use. And as you can see with the dates, I write on it, so like, you know, every couple of days or something like that. So yeah.
Well, I've— my personal notes TiddlyWiki is now, I think, 7 years old and it still sort of fits and works for me. And it is quite nice. Well, a funniness that you— that I find after having had it for so long is that on several occasions I've gone to make the same note, so I think, 'Oops, I'm going to write down,' then again find the place where I need to write it down and find that I already did it. It's as if writing generally allows you to have a relationship with yourself in a way that just sitting in the sun thinking doesn't really let you do that. You know, the experience of being human, the days just fly by. But I love how writing roots what I'm doing and thinking in time, and that's why the timestamps are so important.
Yes, and it helps you also go back to your previous self and what you were thinking at a certain point in time. And it's very interesting sometimes, I think, you know, just seeing the evolution of your thinking.
How far back can you go? I mean, before TiddlyWiki, I know you were experimenting with— well, are still using Roam, and I'd like to talk about that— but going further back, what's been your journey since you discovered computers and thinking and started putting those things together?
That's the thing, actually. I could go back very, very far in terms of taking notes, but I've been weirdly a pen and paper person for a very long time, and I only very recently decided to start taking notes online, and that started with Roam, actually. So yeah, I could go back, I could go and grab some notebooks and look at diary entries from years back. I started writing when I was a kid and I haven't stopped since then. But from a digital standpoint, I only started very recently, and I kind of regret not doing it earlier because I can already see all of the advantages of being able to very easily search through my notes, which is not possible with all of my analog ones.
Yes, yes. And were your old paper notes, were they always journals? Were they always written as a slab of text for each day?
Yeah, and they were basically— usually what I do every day is that I write a tiny bit about, you know, what's on my mind, how I feel, what I am thinking about, what, you know, sometimes has been keeping me up at night. And then it's bullet points of things that I want to work on or things I want to read or things I want to write about, which would probably be a little bit more similar to a task list from, you know, a digital standpoint. And then doodles sometimes when I'm just thinking, so like mind maps and things like this. So they're pretty messy. I don't think they would fit in the proper, you know, the clean definition of what a daily diary is. But I use them the same way I use lots of my digital tools today. It's just like a thinking tool without really having— I think the big difference I have with my TiddlyWiki right now is that the content I put in there is a little bit more polished because my goal is to articulate my thoughts in a way that can be shared with the world, whereas my analog diaries are just for myself and they're kind pretty messy.
You're liking that discipline?
Yes, I feel like, yeah, like the idea of having to, you know, like everything I put on this version of TiddlyWiki, if every time I build it, it goes on the study website and it goes online, so it does give you the discipline to take just an extra few minutes to really articulate things the way you want to convey them, which you don't really have when you're writing just for yourself.
Yes, I guess I like the idea that you were still perhaps treating your journal as a second brain, but an append-only second brain where you could only add on to the end of it. It was the only editorial act and couldn't go back and add links to old stuff.
Yeah, it's very interesting you're mentioning this because I do have, if you look at the static version here, I actually removed the publish date. So all of the posts, they have the last edited date because I actually, with this setup, feel very comfortable. And this is also why, if you look at here, these dates, as you, are not the ones where I created the notes. On this day, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, I didn't write 7 notes that day. It's just that that day I edited these 7 notes. I went back to them and added some stuff or removed some stuff or rephrased some stuff. And this setup compared to— I would never do that with an analog diary. I would never go back and rephrase something or make it better or link stuff together. Whereas here with TiddlyWiki, I do tend to do this, and it so happens where I'm writing a new note and I'm like, oh, actually, now that I'm thinking about this, I think there's a better way to phrase something I wrote about a few days ago, and I just go back to it and I edit it. So that's something I really like about it, is that it's really about evergreen notes that I can go back to anytime, and it doesn't really matter when was the first time I published them. What really matters is how recently I've been kind of like tending to them, if you use the digital garden metaphor.
Yeah, no, that's— this is— it's fascinating. It's very close to the motivation for doing TiddlyWiki for me, was that I wanted to blog, I wanted to participate in the blogosphere, but obviously being a software person thought I could write software as a displacement activity. But my thinking was that it would be easier to write in small interconnected chunks, and then my readers could decide which asides to follow and so on. And of course I've never done it, having years ago having had that plan. So it's very, it's really lovely for me to see, I mean lots of people have made static sites with TiddlyWiki, but I think it's what you're trying to accomplish with it that's much more ambitious and interesting to say. Very much what I hoped we would see. And so yeah, very, very joyous. But you'd started to talk about the journals when I'd asked you about digital antecedents to Roam and to Liwiqi, but I'd be interested if there is anything, if there is anything in that gap in between that you can mention. I mean, were you a folder full of markdowns? Files person at some point, that kind of thing.
Yeah, I am. So the technique that I use is called— I'm going to— I actually wrote about it in Burt's Tissue Journaling.
Oh yes, yes.
So that's what I use. I don't do that in TiddlyWiki, I do this in Roam, but I think it can work anywhere. I've actually seen on the group Someone has been creating— I don't know why this is—
because Google search is rubbish.
Yeah, here. I don't know where it is, but someone has been creating a plugin for it.
You just went past it. I just saw it. He says pointing at the screen that you can't see.
So yeah, it's, as you can see here, it's pretty simple, right? You just write the time and what you're doing. And so the way I do this is that I, and that's why it's called interstitial journaling, is that I do it anytime I take a break. Right. I try to focus on something and usually a lot of the work I do in my daily life involves writing. So very often it's going to be either writing for myself, for my blog, or it's going to be freelance writing for a magazine or something like this. So I sit down and like, okay, let's write this. And then I will inevitably, while doing research, stumble upon something interesting or get distracted by Twitter or, you know, so if that happens, I basically stop and I, I write the time and here you can see an example. I fell into Twitter. Back to work. Made good progress. I'm just talking to myself. This is also for me a way to— I'm going to— this is Rome, by the way. And daily notes. Oh yeah, this is me talking to myself here. But I would do this type of thing. That's the current time, local time here in London. I would say, you know, going to start my recording with Jeremy. And let's say I get distracted and I find an article about very meta interstitial journaling. And so what I would do here is that I would just say, uh, I want to read this later. And then if I go to read, this is my reading inbox. It shows everything that I have said I wanted to read. Usually during— you can see the dates here. That means that was during an interstitial, the Times journaling session. It means I got distracted, I found an article, and I decided to read it later. So it's a way to unload distractions onto this reading inbox that I can use later. But yeah, this is the way I journal, basically.
And it's really interesting to see that happening. When you opened Roam, it opened on the lines and boxes view. How useful do you find that?
Yeah, so I'm going to wait until it closes and I'm going to— oh yeah, here. Honestly, it's more of a fun thing. I don't find it that practical. So here, what's interesting is that if you click, you can see all of the connections between my notes about neuroscience are connected to memory. What is here? If you follow it. Connected to neuroplasticity here. It's fun. I can double-click and see like different notes. This is about epilepsy, for example. It's not that useful as a thinking tool. Something I find much more useful is, you know, let's take this note, for example. Is to open— I click on Brain here, that opens on the side.
It's very nice.
So that's really nice. And also what's really great is that I can here hold this and I can bring it here. Mm-hmm. And it allows me to, you know, write— I'm going to cancel this because I want to keep this here, but it allows me to write stuff by pulling notes at the block level. That's called a block in Roam, which is a bullet point basically. I can bring data at the block level from different notes I took before and collate them together and then rewrite them. And that creates an original article that is built from different Lego blocks from stuff I've read before and took notes about. So to me, this opening in the sidebar is much more useful than the graph overview. Which is more of a toy thing.
Yeah, I think Roam is sensational. I've really enjoyed it. You know, as a software— somebody building software, one of the really annoying things is all the paths you can't take, and because there's only one of you. And so when you see somebody taking a parallel path— and, and so to me, the thing that Conor's done that I find fascinating is exactly the kind of thing I did with TiddlyWiki, is he's dispensed with tags in favor of links and realized that you can bend links to be everything you do with tags, and it's beautiful to then watch the consequences of that thinking ripple through the design, which is obviously how complex systems like this get developed. You sort of, you come up with your basic principles, you hope that they'll be sturdy enough to build the whole thing on. And Roam, I get repeated glimpses that many of the things that I think are important are also on Conor's roadmap. So yeah, really exciting.
Definitely. I think this is something both TiddlyWiki and Roam have in common, is that this is the simplicity behind the thinking, the fact that basically it's such a pure way of approaching things and it's kind of a build-your-own-adventure kind of experience for the user makes them both kind of hard to grasp at the very beginning. I've heard people telling me, I'm lost, I just installed TiddlyWiki, I'm not even sure where to go. And I've heard the exact same thing about Roam, like, I created an account, I'm here on this empty page, where do I go? What am I supposed to do? How does this thing work? And the more time you spend into it and the more effort you put into learning how to use them and kind of like shaping experience to what makes sense for you and for the learning goals that you have on an individual level, the more you appreciate that simplicity and the fact that both of them don't come with an exact, you know, map of how to use them out of the box. It's really about building your own thinking tool, and no two Tiddlywikis and no two Roams will look the same if you look at what people have designed for themselves.
I think that's beautiful. But one thing I'd like to throw in there is the comparison of the business models. Conor's very clear that he doesn't think that open source is the right business model for building Tools for Thought. And for those that don't know, he's exploring a subscription model with a discount for students and certain other people, which again, wish him really good luck. It's not an option that's really open to me, but again, it's very interesting to see how it works. What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, I mean, this is how I found TiddlyWiki in the first place. I was actually looking up open source alternatives to Roam because I absolutely love Roam. I'm a huge, you know, I'm a big advocate of it. I tweet about it all the time. I've had many people tell me that they started using it, same for TiddlyWiki, because they read some of my articles or tweets about it. So I absolutely love it, but That being said, I'm giving Roam, you know, it's literally, you know, pouring all of my thoughts into Roam. And as someone who's a knowledge worker, I study neuroscience. Nest Labs is basically, you know, all of the value of Nest Labs comes from how well I can think and how well I can express these thoughts. So I'm definitely, you know, I am part of the category of people known as knowledge workers. So my mind is my most precious tool and, you know, kind of outsourcing this to a company where I have zero control over what the pricing is going to look like or the direction they're going to take it or what they decide to do with my data. And I do on a personal level trust Connor a lot. I, you know, I really appreciate him and I do think that he has the best of intentions, but the fact is he took outside outside investment. That means that he's not the only person making decisions now. And to me, it is very important to have a backup. And so TiddlyWiki for me is doing this also at the moment. It is a way to export— I don't export everything from Roam into TiddlyWiki, but I export what I think are my most important thoughts, the ones that, for example, Roam notes, I'm okay leaving in Roam. Stuff that, you know, I've just listened to a lecture or read a book and I have some snippets that I put into Roam, that's completely fine. But stuff I have spent time rephrasing and thinking about myself, I do put into my digital garden, into TiddlyWiki, because that would be a huge loss for me if at some point I lost access. So yeah, it's very interesting. Absolutely respect the way Conor is taking things with Roam, but I do encourage all of my friends who are using Roam to think about think about what is your backup system. What happens if tomorrow you lose access or the folks at Roam decide to do stuff with your data you're not comfortable about? What's your plan, basically? Like, don't wait until it happens to think about it.
Yeah, and I'm pleased with the discussion we saw recently about improving the options for importing data from Roam. So I guess if there's a message for Roam's users, it's that keeping that export functionality is important. And on our part, I think it's good for Roam as well if we have a realistic, robust migration path, because then that makes people safer in using Roam as well.
Absolutely. And to Conor's credit and the team's credit, they've made it really easy to export content. And I love that also on the Slack channel for Roam, there is a sub-channel for people developing an open source alternative to Roam. And Conor has not only allowed it, he's encouraged it. So I think this is why I am not too worried. I really think his mind is in a good place. And he does understand, for someone who's so passionate about collective intelligence and network thinking. He does understand the value of making sure Roam is part of a rich ecosystem rather than being in a silo. So I think it's actually amazing how easy he's made it to export the notes. So now I love also that on the TiddlyWiki side, lots of people are working on making it easier to import those JSON files and Markdown files into TiddlyWiki in a way that preserves the rich interlinking infrastructure that you have from Roam.
Yeah, indeed. Well, yes, the same for my part. I'm delighted that— well, I don't really think of it as competition, as I say, but I'm really delighted to see people experimenting with all of the options. TiddlyWiki, because VCs took an interest in it early on, because that's that's what they do. But once they discovered that everybody downloaded the entire code that there was once they visited the website, they kind of lost interest and never tried to imagine a business model. And of course, that's really good because it meant I didn't waste any time, you know, and it wouldn't have been the right life choice for me. So, Anne-Laure, I'm conscious that we've used up about half an hour of your time. Is there anything else that you are planning to show us, that you've got ready to show us?
I guess a good way to finish this conversation would probably be to walk people through my publishing process to go from local version of TiddlyWiki article to a live note on mentlnotes.com. Would that be interesting?
Yes, great. So if you can make a note and then we can see it in the file system and then see it That would be amazing.
Yeah, okay, so here we go. I'm— that's, as you can see in the URL, that's my local Node version of TiddlyWiki here. So I'm just going to create a new note, and this is a demo note for my chat with Jeremy. Hello there. Important thing here, I made a few tweaks One of the biggest reasons why people may want to have a static website versus just uploading the one HTML file that TiddlyWiki has is SEO, search engine indexing. So I made a few tweaks so I have meta tags for each article, and I make sure so to add these here every time. I usually just pick a random sentence from the copy and put it there. Hello there, this is SEO description. There we go. So that's it. I'm just going to save this. And then, so that's my— I'm going to— I know there is probably an easier way to do this, but I have a file that has— it's here, actually. That's what I'm going to run here. It really is— I think it's the same thing you have in the TiddlyWiki.info file, but I am calling files here that I have edited rather than the core ones. So that's the only change that I have made. And you're doing a sitemap.
I didn't realize that you're doing that.
Great. Yeah, so that I was worried about touching the core files and breaking something. So I did it in a separate one. So I'm just going to do this. Here you can see it says cannot find plugin. I have no idea what it's doing this, but it's actually generating the sitemap. Okay. But I still get this notification every time and I just ignore it. So now the website is built and We're going to go here. The website is here now. Everything we just did is here. And so the reason why I have a separate file folder for building it, and that's the one that's on GitHub actually, and there's also maybe another way to do this, but the way TiddlyWiki works in building the website is that it deletes absolutely everything that is in that folder and then rebuilds it, and I used to scratch my head and not understand what was breaking with GitHub. And because the Git file, the version control file, was getting deleted too in that build process every single time. So now I have it in a separate one. So this here doesn't get deleted. So I have everything here, and I'm just going to Copy everything and paste it here. It's going to ask me, do you want to replace? Yes, I'm fine doing this. And now we have everything that's here. And I just go back here and I'm going to publish this to Jeremy.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff.
And what did I do here?
That looks—
not found.
Oh, because you used an exclamation mark inside double quotes, and so Bash hates you.
Oh my God, that's the first time I do this. It's the first time I'm excited about pushing something live, so I never put exclamation mark in there. Okay, I didn't even know that was an issue. Learning stuff. Jeremy, no exclamation mark.
Yes.
Okay, yeah, that looks better.
Yeah, that's better.
Here we go. That's something I don't link to on the website. Like, I mean, it's live, but I'm the only one accessing it. But for people watching this, I think it's fine. Let's just go and see. Wait a second while this is being built because I basically, this is going on the— I'm using this to build the website from GitHub.
Okay, well, they're great. We like Netlify. Should make an easier path working with them. GitHub Pages is like an apple that won't boil when it's, you know, when we're watching it. But you said that you showed us your recent changes page and said that you're not linking to it, and you know, and you were questioning aloud whether it was okay to show it. And I'm really sympathetic to that because I guess that's underpinning your You're strongly trying to stop people sitting at it as a blog where they check in to see what you've done. You want them to experience it as a journey through the hyper-connected, these hyper-connected thoughts.
Absolutely. I don't want people— this is also why, you know, as I mentioned, there's no publish date. It's when I edited it, and I don't want people to look at it in a chronological way. This page I really created for myself to check if things are working, and right now for some reason they're not actually. Obviously when you try to do something live, this is when things are breaking. But I use this page just to check that things have been published okay. So, and I don't, I don't, yeah, I don't want people to see it as a blog with like a daily post. I want to feel comfortable some days not publishing anything new, but actually spending an hour editing previous posts. And I also want the opposite, feeling comfortable publishing 10 posts in one day if really I'm feeling inspired and I want to write more content. So yeah, I don't want to— this is why I call it a digital garden and not a blog. It's not the same for me.
Certainly one of the things that used to vex me about blogging was even though I couldn't do it in— I wasn't a blogger in 2003, was the idea that, okay, so if I say I do blog for 5 years, what will I have? 5 years and you have a stack of blog posts and it's about as useless as a scroll in ancient Greece. Pretty much all you can do is linearly jump through, read through them, or do incredibly random jumps. And so yes, I sympathize with this, not wanting your work to just pile up as a sludge that's hard to navigate. Yes.
Yes.
Excellent.
Yes. I have, I don't know, I don't know why. So do, oh no, it's here now on this page. Okay. I have no idea why it took so long, but here it is. I have also this little thingy where I can preview pages by hovering over them. And so this is the demo note and it's live now. We have it.
Right, talking about that, the hover effect reminded me that I guess once you discovered how to make static files with TiddlyWiki, you already had the skills to then easily apply to editing the HTML templates, for instance, get your metadata in there and so on. So you were— and I also note you're very comfortable on the command line, on the terminal, and you were instantly able to use TiddlyWiki in that way too. So it seems like you were quite fortuitously— you got all the right skills to make the best use of it.
I learned coding last year, so I'm pretty much a code newbie, but yes, I think, you know, once you have the basics, it's actually very easy to edit stuff. And so you can see here That's my edited one. I have the meta information. Wait, it's not here. Yeah, here it is. That's the bit that pulls the description that you saw me entering earlier. So it means that if I go here and I look at the source here, this is the SEO description.
And in fact, yeah. I was going to say, if you tweeted that article, then I think Twitter would perhaps do something different with it, given that data. Is that right?
Absolutely. It auto-fills it with the link, the titles. It has this hashtag and it tags me so I can see people automatically posting it. I can reply to people. And all of this comes from— that actually comes from the the actual— I think it comes from here. Yes, it's here. Took me a while actually, and people from this group helped me a lot to get it work. I was really struggling with this functionality, but I got it. And so you have Pocket, you have Reddit here, Facebook, and the tweet one here you can see is— that's the, you know, native URL you have to use from Twitter. And then it gets the URL, the text is the title, and via— that's my Twitter handle, the hashtag is here, and you know all of this anchor is on the little Twitter icon here.
Yeah, no, that's— it's really beautifully done.
Thank you, it's been really fun to build.
As it makes it— it turns TiddlyWiki into, you know, into a conventional website and one of the criticisms of TiddlyWiki understandably is that it is a very unorthodox website, but, and yet it's able to simultaneously shed its skin and become a conventional one. We could carry on for a lot longer, I know, and there's much to talk about, so perhaps we'll, if you can spare the time, we'll ask you on the show, we'll ask you on again in the future, but For the moment, I'd like to thank you very much for taking the time, and on behalf of everybody in the community, really appreciate you preparing and sharing with us like that. So thank you so much.
Thanks so much for having me, Jeremy. That was great.
Cheers. Bye.
Bye.
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