(2020-04-17) Jones Backlinks In Cardigan Bay

Phil Jones: Backlinks in Cardigan Bay. People seem to be very excited about Roam Research at the moment. I’m sure it has many qualities (including a decent mobile client). But I’m slightly surprised to realize that one thing that fans seem to find very useful (and almost miraculous) is the automatic back-linking. Ie, the ability to see what pages link to the page you are currently on.

I’ve always thought that links that people bother to make explicitly are more interesting and should be valued more highly than links that are implicit.

Nevertheless, automatic backlinks are clearly the fashion. And as I’m working on Cardigan-bay: A new wiki engine in Clojure I figured I might as well add this feature.

However, right now this is fine for small wikis with a few pages. On the actual ThoughtStorms data (as you see in the screen shot above), which has over 4000 pages and an order of magnitude more links, it’s way too slow. So I’m going to have to figure out how (and more importantly, where) I’m going to cache the results. And when I have to recalculate them, etc.

Update : I just did a quick experiment where I took out the (page p) and (page q) clauses from the query. And it’s now much faster.