project planning with tiddlywiki
There are apparently a lot of TiddlyWiki plugins or rewrites centered around “Getting Things Done” or other project management systems. That’s not what I did today.
I made my first pass at spiking the “store structured data in TiddlyWiki” for my D&D game by testing on data for work. We’re working on planning out a set of large tasks at work, and I wanted to produce a plan. I put each task on a TiddlyWiki tiddler, with all of its prereqs listed in a bulleted list. The pages contain descriptions of the tasks, links to related tasks, whatever. It’s only the bulleted lists that are special, in that they signify dependencies – and even that only on pages tagged with Graphable. Some other pages are tagged with “Goal,” indicating a task that represents an end goal, as opposed to a step toward a goal. Others are tagged with “Unclear,” because they represend some sort of hand-wavey idea rather than something one can do in a day or two.
Tiddlers are stored in the HTML file as div elements with a tiddler
attribue containing the name and a tags attribute containing the tag string.
The content of the tiddler is stored in the content of the div, with newlines
converted to the literal string “\n”
Pulling out the tiddlers I wanted was easy: I just parsed the file with
HTML::TreeBuilder, then did a look_down for divs with a tiddler attribute and
a tags attribute matching something like qr{\bGraphable\b}. I used those to
output lines like this:
PageName -> NameOfPageInList
For pages with some of the other tags, I tacked on a little more information. Fed to GraphViz, this provided me with a full-color diagram of all of the tasks and their dependencies, including where I needed more information – either subtasks or better task definitions.
Total extra code for this goal? About twenty lines of Perl.
I can’t wait to apply this advanced technology to my D&D wiki.