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.
After spending half a day diving deeper into Nikola’s theme engine and the archive of available themes, I’ve had second thoughts about hitching my cart to the Nikola pony. It’s perfectly functional, but to get anything close to the layout I’m aiming for, I would have to build an awful lot of the front end myself. For both the desktop and mobile contexts. And if I’m being honest, I don’t have much interest in that particular adventure. I’d rather adapt something that’s already close. So here I go, back into the static site generator dating market.
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The engine with the widest variety of available themes seems to be Hugo, and, I must say, on first impressions it looks pretty good. The expected file format and folder structure is close enough to Nikola’s that I’ll be able to adapt my shadow casting script, so I should be able to test with real data pretty quickly.
Additionally, there are several themes that might make a good starting point, but I’m going to begin my test with a fairly basic one until I’m sure I’ve got my plumbing all soldered up correctly. Then when I start tinkering with more advanced themes, I’ll know that any issues I encounter are there related and not a problem with the foundation itself.
Wish me luck. I’m going in…
