Intrawiki Searching

[dolphinhansen]

First I love Tiddlyhost. It is what I have been looking for. I have many Tiddlywiki's there in.

I am mostly a content provider. I have created a number of "ebooks" on Tiddlyhost, in the Tiddlywiki format - there is great value in this format - stand alone, usable cross platform, self-contained, past, present, and future versions work within a browser... I wish I were technical enough to create my own version (for private use and public sharing). I have explored the many posts and ideas out there on this. Tiddlyhost is the best version I've seen so far. There is a niche for Tiddlywiki publishing on the web.

There is value in having a Tiddlywiki library of many Tiddlywikis because of issues that come with size and content focus. A good example of this in "Federatial" as shown in the "AMBIT" project (https://manuals.annafreud.org/ambit).

As I think about it, I see 2 obvious ways to go about the "Intrawiki search" (I'm sure there are more ideas and approaches to this).

1. The encyclopedia model, where there is one massive wiki containing sections, sub-sections and categories on all topics. Wikipedia is an example of this and it is massive. (Tiddlywiki wasn't created for this scale of use)

2. The library model, where there is a central library, containing many stand alone books on subjects, themes, topics, genres...etc. Organized for searching, check-out, use, and reference.

In building content both personally, and professionally - I've been fortunate to have the latitude to adopt and use Tiddlywiki. I am finding that the 2nd concept is more practical, usable, and easier for my end users to adopt. I work for a large agency that has a vast collection of documents, booklets, instructions, historical records, manuals, memorandums of understanding (MOU) and standard operating procedure (SOP).

I am not a programmer; I am technical enough to use markup language, CSS, scripts, and such - so Tiddlywiki is a great fit.

Is there a platform, implementation, framework or such - that would allow one to search among a library of Tiddlywikis?

TiddlyHost, has a "tag" search option; however to search my library, at this moment, I download my whole library to my local machine and do a file content search to find a keyword, phrase or category. Not ideal for me or my end users. Also of note - I do use "Intrawiki" links (linking one wiki to another via the content). This works, to a point.

Ideally - it would be nice to be able to search among all the available wiki's on Tiddlyhost's "Hub Sites" for specific content, and then click into that Tiddlywiki for the details (I don't want to see or share the "personal/private" content - just the "publicly" shared content).

As I reflect on what I have written here, an "Intrawiki search" ability would potentially elevate Tiddlywiki to a knowledge management system, use status.

I am open to discussion, other ideas (how to do this), and I can take a "No" if that is the answer. :-)

[simonbaird]

It's an interesting idea. Indexing all the text in all the hub wikis could be done. That would allow you to do text searches your own public TiddlyWiki collections (as well as anyone else's). Also being able to search your own content across many TiddlyWikis, whether they be public or private is also interesting, but I'm not sure many people would use it much. It sounds like a fairly niche requirement. Can you see it being useful for the average TiddlyWiki/Tiddlyhost user?

Another idea would be to provide better results for google spider indexers. For example a google query like this kinda works, (though not very well).

[dolphinhansen]

I appreciate the alternative suggestion.

I do see the Intrawiki search being used by many, but not all. I believe teachers would use it, as well as those who use it for knowledge management, and publishing of internet content.

I defer to you on whether you see it worth the time and resources. Supporting certain niches does add value and differentiation to one's service or product. Thank you for your time and consideration.