I know Jack reads the marmot because when I post something about Tinderbox, I look for a post about Tinderbox from Jack. Sure enough, right after iPhone Camera Test Export, Jack made a brief post about Tinderbox.

Back in the day, we'd all be referencing each other, Alwin Hawkins, Garret Vreeland, Susan Kitchens, Karl Martino, James Vornov, Hal Rager, Shelley Powers, AKMA, Jonathon Delacour, Stavros the Wonder Chicken, Mike Warot and many others. Facebook sucked all the oxygen out of the blogosphere and then Twitter kind of finished the job. Most of those folks still blog, but not with the same frequency and interaction. That's all still in the "social media" space.

Since the marmot is all just static html, I don't have any fancy "trackback" mechanisms, and I look at the hosting company logs so seldom that I don't really understand what I'm looking at when I do. If anyone links to the marmot, I have to be already subscribed to them in RSS to notice. Not that anyone necessarily should link to the marmot. Still, it's nice to know you're not just ranting into the void every now and then.

Anyway, lament aside, I'd say to Jack not to fear anything going pear-shaped in Tinderbox. The simplest thing is to duplicate the Tinderbox file and perform all your experiments in the duplicate. Do a "proof of concept" in a test file before you even do that. If worse comes to worst, and it has a couple of times for me, Mark Bernstein at Eastgate will help if you send him the file and ask politely. Probably worth a visit to the forum first though. And there's always the weekend meetups.

Besides, anyone who can wrangle emacs can definitely master Tinderbox!

My infatuation with "tools for thought" has cooled significantly. I have zero interest in Roam, Obsidian, The Brain, zettelkasten, etc. If I was employed and my job was producing reports with references and so on, then it might be different. Thinking occurs in the brain, writing helps me "see what I think." Tinderbox is a wonderful writing tool. Nodes and edges, links and backlinks, it all comes down to the connections between your ears.

But I still love Tinderbox. (Parenthetically, I just noticed the screenshot on the web page and it "surprised and delighted" me.

The fact that it can do so much more that what I use it for doesn't particularly trouble me. And getting that little "Rule" to work so I can post iPhone pictures the other day just made me so happy. I usually just get frustrated and give up. I treasured that little feeling of accomplishment. Still feels good.

Of course, now I have another idea I want to try, and as we all know, "Trying is the first step toward failure!"

Anyway, just thought I'd say, "Hi, Jack!"

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:18 Friday, 14 July 2023