⁨Andric Tham⁩'s Posts

Andric Tham

Jun 23, 2023

Rich media blocks beyond YouTube (OG cards for links, Tweets, Github gists, Figma)

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Explain the problem as you see it

The Tana Capture app shows a rich media preview of links with OG metadata, but that isn’t preserved when you view it in the Tana app.
Links to tweets don’t show up. Capacities does a great job here of unrolling the tweet into a thread, and other tools like Notion and Roam use Twitter’s embed to show the first tweet.
For collaboration on projects, embedding Figma files and GitHub Gists are essential. There are probably many more low-hanging fruit (look at what Notion supports for ideas).

Why is this a problem for you?

Tana wants to be a replacement for Notion and Roam, but:

You can’t use it as a bookmarking app for tweets like Notion
You can’t use it as a thinking space like Roam where you can thread ideas from Twitter
You can’t use it as a space to collaborate with others on projects like Notion, since media blocks from other tools aren’t embeddable. Tana can’t do everything, and you need to use other tools together with it.

Suggest a solution

When I paste a link to a tweet, unroll that tweet and corresponding thread for me by parsing the webpage
- Twitter links in my space should be preprocessed in the same way when this feature is launched
When I paste a link to a webpage, grab the webpage’s favicon, title, description, and cover image and use that to style and populate the link node
- Preprocess all raw URLs that are already in my space without a custom title
Nice to have: Continue to support multimedia embeds from other apps as an ongoing development effort, eventually reaching parity with Notion. If Tana wants to replace Notion for team collaboration, this is a non-negotiable feature that’s table stakes.

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Andric Tham

Mar 13, 2023

Let me hide or filter references (i.e. backlinks) to any given node

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Explain the problem as you see it

Sometimes a link matters more as an outgoing link (to add context) than it does as an incoming backlink.

To avoid cluttering the references section under any given node, let me hide incoming references to any given node that are irrelevant so that those that I can see only those that are relevant, which speeds up the way I navigate through my Tana workspace(s).

Note: While I’ve encountered this problem most recently while I’m using Tana for learning, this is equally valid in other use cases I’ve used Tana for, such as collaborative project management and research, where there are many-to-one relationships where the “many” side can be really noisy.

Why is this a problem for you?

I have a Tana workspace where I store references (i.e. tutorials, code samples, books, videos, etc) to certain topics I’m learning.

Sometimes, a reference is directly relevant to the topic I’m learning. Other times, it’s only relevant in context of another topic.

For instance, this tutorial might demonstrate integrating with Supabase and Prisma. In this context, the use of node.js, Typescript, and PostgreSQL is only tangential. The resource is really trying to teach Supabase and Prisma.

I still want to link to node.js, Typescript, and PostgreSQL inside of a field so that I can see at a glance what technologies this tutorial is teaching, but I do not want to see the reference to this tutorial when I’m viewing the node.js, Typescript, or PostgreSQL nodes in full-screen, for in those contexts, it’s not highly-relevant. I might want to see tutorials that specifically teach those technologies, instead.

Search nodes are not a solution to this, as they filter on nodes by explicit inclusion criteria, rather than implicit or explicit exclusion criteria. More on this below.

Suggest a solution

In the “References” section that shows up when you are viewing a node in full-screen:

Let me hide certain references (implicit exclusion)
- The exclusion criteria is implicit because I only know something is irrelevant contextually. It cannot be inferred from any fields that are on the incoming reference.
Let me filter out certain references based on certain criteria (specified as exclusion criteria, rather than inclusion criteria like Search Nodes)
- Why exclusion criteria? It’s easier to tell if something is low-signal a posteriori (after the fact) rather than a priori (before the fact). So, let me filter out irrelevant references, rather than search for relevant references before I know what might or might not be relevant.

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