Project WebSmith is about more than just creating a website. It’s about creating a “thought-sharing” extension to the system I use for keeping my personal notes. Whether it’s ideas for a project, progress notes, book reviews, thoughts about social issues, whatever. I keep all of that in one place. And now I want to be able to share selected entries automatically. So the project name “websmith,” isn’t only about the worldwide web - or also refers to my own personal web of ideas, projects, and communications. (I’ll leave the origin of the “smith” part as an exercise for the reader. :-)
The primary interface for this system is my personal wiki, which I’ve been using in one form or another for almost 20 years. For the last 5, it has resided in Obsidian, which I access almost exclusively through my Android phone, although I also use vim when I’m working on a computer that has a keyboard.
The public-facing side of all this is being driven by Hugo, which takes any notes I’ve flagged for public consumption and builds my new website from them. If you’re reading this and you aren’t me, chances are high that you’re viewing the results of that pipeline now. :-)
This project stream will be about my adventures shoe-horning Hugo into my existing Obsidian workflow.
There’s an important part of the system that I’ve yet to embrace: where to host the source code for my projects? In a recent post about Plim I codified the need to post code early and often, but neglected to say where that would be. This is the rumination where I’ll try to answer that question…
Just as I was about to send the new site out into the world, I discovered that it was injured. Now I have to find the problem and fix it before I can launch, but that’s turning out to be trickier than expected.
It’s only been about a week, but in that short time I’ve had to change the core structure several times. I think, though, that I finally have my toys arranged in a tidy, predictable, and flexible system. This means I can now return to integrating the last major content block before I launch the site: the CaveTV Videos.
But what did I change? And how will those changes support future needs as well as current? Let’s talk about that.