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.
Yesterday I took a step forward on this wiki-to-web journey and today I’m going to take a half step back. My initial impulse was to get Nikola to process the wiki and build a web site from a subset of its many pages, but the wiki is not a pretty picture — it’s a sprawling spaghetti mess that more closely resembles a pulsing, flashing Rorschach animation rendered by my short attention span.
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For Nikola to make sense of that, I would have to figure out how the engine expects to traverse its input content files and then rewrite that traversal to pinball its way through my file structure instead.
But there is a much, much simpler path, my son. Shadow files. Instead of teaching Nikola how to speak Jeff, I’ll just write at Jeff-to-Nikola translator. And since I already know how to speak Jeff, this should be both easier and a lot more robust.
Today’s exploits already created a script that traverses the wiki looking for project tags and posts. Now I’ll just have to extend it to copy those into the more organized structure Nikola is expecting, and bathe each file’s forehead in holy metadata. Then — Presto! Change-o! — Nikola can grind its pretty little gears on the well-ordered shadows and make me a website without ever knowing that it’s working for the mob.
