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’m trying to keep the web system simple. At the moment, I can write one of these updates in about 3 minutes. It’s a great way to summarize my progress and think through next steps, then push them out to the public stream for anyone who might be following along.
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But with more options I’ll have to start thinking harder about the updates and end up making fewer of them. More features = more friction. So I’m planning to put all my big effort into the overall look of the site, but each article will have to pick between just a few different layout options. And images are one area I have to be particularly careful about.
I’ve implemented a simple mechanism for indicating what I want right in the Obsidian link. With page links, I can specify a friendly text string to show so the site won’t get visually cluttered with long, hideous URLs, but that friendly name is ignored if you add it to an image link, so I’m just commandeering that friendly name.
Ultimately, I’m going to parse the string as a list, so I can do things like “thumb, left” or “paragraph, center”, which will be assigned as CSS classes to the image and I’ll be able to invoke any class that I’ve bothered to define in the site style guide, but for now I support just two options: nothing, which results in a full-sized image; and “thumb”, which will show the image in thumbnail size. I’ll implement the rest once I figure out how Nikola turns link text into HTML.
And if the
