Refactoring the shadowmaker has become a bigger headache than I had originally anticipated, but it’s for the long-term health of the system, so I’m sticking to my guns. This weekend added further drama when I finally stopped running away from frontmatter and embraced it for all my metadata. Sure, scattering #ch-command directives throughout the body of the notes was insane, but fixing it is going to mean more than just adding a few metadata fields. I may have to completely change the way I use Obsidian.
A couple of powerful features added today that will eventually let me do some cool stuff, but none of those actual cool things added yet.
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Cool Thing #1: Static Pages
I can now generate static pages (About Me, Privacy Policy, etc) by tagging an Obsidian page with ch-page but not assigning a project tag. (Clearly if a page isn’t about a project, it must be about the site as a whole, right?)
Cool Thing #2: Project Galleries
I want to add an image gallery for each project, but only for images that are substantive, like product visualizations, design sketches, circuit diagrams, etc. (Nobody wants to browse a gallery polluted with amusing cartoons and other purely decorative nonsense.) But to make that happen, I first had to build a database of metadata from the images. The shadowmaker now extracts a bunch of useful info from the image description, including a ch-vis tag to indicate that the image is a visualization.
Armed with that, I’m now able to create a gallery for each project, which gives an interesting way to quickly skim a project history and maybe dive into anything that catches your eye. But full disclosure: I have the ability, yes, but I have not yet implemented these actual galleries. Hopefully coming soon.
