Agreed. Late here and full day way tomorrow, so feel free to start it. I think we’re generally agreed on the shape of things.
Mark, I found the list from the closed poll , useful. Not so much from the perspective of future challenges, but from the perspective of what things would people like to do with Tinderbox or what aspects of TB are giving users difficulty. I think this would give Michael Becker some feedback on material for his paid course.
Taking it a step further, what would be some common themes of data management that these challenges present?
Would it be useful to have a thread …
What things do you do with TB ?
What things would you like to do with TB?
Yes, this was my original intention for creating the poll to get feedback on people’s priorities. As my attempt at this poll did not work out, maybe someone else can take a stab at it.
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aTbref is something I have open and ready to search for the right resource, but I have to admit that I often find myself getting lost. I think a “sub-course” or best practices thread on the forum of how to make most efficient use of aTbref would be helpful. I am not suggesting comprehensive coverage or anything of the sort, but rather a simple and basic “guide for the perplexed”…
If you haven’t already, read and work through the two PDF tutorials in the Tinderbox Help menu. They will lead you through the basics, and you can use aTbRef to look things.
FWIW, the the quick links top and bottom of every aTbRef point to likely the most immediately useful parts of the reference.
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Thanks Mark – As they say, been there, done that, but still does not prevent me from getting off track in search of the right path to solve my problems. I suspect what I am looking for is something like the challenges as examples.
Melvin, you’re spot on. For me, the big aha–aka breakthrough–was to refactor the way I view things. Everything is metadata, i.e. value of attributes. A note name is nothing but metadata, a string value. Text two is metadata a string value. Then you have another type of metadata, numbers, lists, sets, dictionaries, etc. A note is a lot like a stem cell, it is a universal sale that has the potential to be anything. As you encode the values of the note you specialize it - e.g, a reference, a person, an entity, whatever you want. You can then use action code to manipulate the values of the attributes, to move data back and forth between notes, to add to it, subtract to it, etc. You can then use export code (inc. HTML, CSS) to format it and display the value of your metadata in any way you want.
Once I figure this out, I then looked at all the action code and export code simply as tools for value management and transformation. I’ve learned that I can take these values and stick them wherever, I want, change them and present them however I like. I’ve then learned that I can interface Tidnerbox with other applications to make additional transformations, e.g., use Pandoc to output to Word, or dynamically transform citations.
I’m not saying that any of this is straightforward or intuitive. It it all starts with this key insight.
Not to worry, my course is coming…with challenge examples. Can you help me? Please list 5~10 things you’d like to do, the outputs you want from your data so that I can work on some challenges for you.
I think debugging tools and/or error messages in Tbx’s action and export languages would go a long way in helping to make it more user-friendly.
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