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.
I’ve been working lately on the system for showcasing completed projects and have been wrestling with the whole naming scheme conundrum. Today I made some key choices, and it affects more than just names. I’ve changed the way I think about products too.
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When it comes to the Creativity Hacker brand, I want the vibe here to be about creative exploration, curiosity, ideas, and tinkering - not about selling shit. Sure, some of my projects yield products that I sell to the public - books, games, etc - but that’s not what I’m all about, so it shouldn’t be what my site is about either.
Driven by that thought, I’ve been trying to figure out how to showcase completed projects. I’ve already got this rich infrastructure for sharing notes and plans for the projects currently in development, but how do I share the results of those projects once they’re done?
At first, this was just a naming exercise. Active projects are currently listed under the “Projects” menu, but that menu is explicitly for works in progress. Where should I put the books and videos and cartoons etc that I’ve already completed? More specifically, what do I call that area? I didn’t want anything overtly commercial sounding like “Sales Floor” or “Product Catalogue,” but I couldn’t find a term that fit with the vibe I’m going for.
This led me to realize that the term “Projects” was also a bit bland, and that calling my catch-all blog page “The Blog” was even less inspired. So I hopped into ChatGPT for a quick brainstorming session and, in the process of talking to myself through the AI, managed to come to some conclusions. The three sections of the site I was trying to name actually represent the three major phases of my creative project lifecycle: ideation, development, and dissemination. Those are not the names I’ll be going with, but recognizing them as the three fundamental steps in a project’s journey really helped me to see how they fit into the overall context of the site, which I want to feel like an online manifestation of my workshop.
So the first conclusion I reached was a naming scheme for the sections of the site:
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The blog is where I talk about random stuff that isn’t related to a specific project. But often, I suspect those posts (and the conversations I have with folks in the comments) will lead me to new project ideas. It’s also the place where I hope others will feel most at ease to engage in the banter. Very much like what I was trying to do with my newsletter, but with a greater potential for actual conversations, so the name should be obvious. Welcome to the next phase of The Liar’s Hearth.
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The “Projects” menu is where I’ve organized all the projects I’m actively working on, but “projects” is a bit too broad a term. I won’t be putting completed projects there, or failed ones. So what do I call the part of the workshop where I actively develop new things? The Laboratory, of course.
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With those pieces of the puzzle in place, it was easy to recognize that the place where I show off completed projects should be the Exhibits Hall.
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Then, continuing right along with that motif, I decided that I don’t want a “Tags” menu - I want a page listing my research Themes.
I’m happy with those. They feel unified, like they’re not just part of the vibe I’m going for, but actively helping to convey it. But there was one thing that still didn’t sit comfortably in all of that: the Exhibits Hall. I like the name but do I really want to use it to send people out to commercial sales venues and expect them to buy my work? I’m totally fine with expecting people to pay for stuff if they come across it in a store, but if they’ve come all the way to my creative lab, it somehow feels wrong. It’s a bit like asking dinner guests to pay for their food.
So I’ve decided that, yes, the products that emerge from my lab will indeed be available commercially, and links to them will be part of my Exhibits Hall, but I’m also going to have links beside them that will let you download them for free.
That feels more like a creative community to me.
