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.
As mentioned, I’m searching for a simpler way to manage my blog with minimal server-side requirements, easy posting workflow, and integration with both my phone and my usual note-talking infrastructure: Obsidian wiki. But lets get more specific.
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My requirements are:
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a static file system with no server back end other than the HTML server
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no server side databases or code for me to maintain
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no hackable entry points through which assholes can fuck up my life
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like a lab diary for multiple concurrent projects, all advancing in parallel
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content pulled from my existing markdown wiki system that I already use for my project notes
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but only pulls specific posts that I explicitly mark for external sharing
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the engine that turns markdown into html and pushes to the server must all be in Python so it will play nice with my existing tool infrastructure
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supports one or more templating engines so I can prettify the site somewhat but will not be tempted into dynamic front-end coding
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requires absolutely no manual interventions in the back end to handle new posts or projects
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everything has to run comfortably on my ancient laptop
With those ambitions in mind, I spent some time today exploring the Nikola engine. I used it last year for a one-off experiment and I remember being pretty pleased at how well it delivered on all of those requirements. But sadly, I couldn’t even remember what it was called. (Thank you, geriatric memory degradation. :-) Anyway, after an hour of digging through old emails, I finally found it, and was able to begin the process of reloading my brain.
If you’re reading this on the site some day, then I must have eventually made enough progress to get something pushed to production, but that day was not this day. Today I was able to figure out a preliminary system for using page tags to control which articles get posted to which protect pages, and I got a bare-bones listing generated on my development machine. It’s ugly and it’s only 3 web pages, but it’s a start.
