Project WebSmith is about more than just creating a website. It’s about creating a “thought-sharing” extension to the system I use for keeping my personal notes. Whether it’s ideas for a project, progress notes, book reviews, thoughts about social issues, whatever. I keep all of that in one place. And now I want to be able to share selected entries automatically. So the project name “websmith,” isn’t only about the worldwide web - or also refers to my own personal web of ideas, projects, and communications. (I’ll leave the origin of the “smith” part as an exercise for the reader. :-)
The primary interface for this system is my personal wiki, which I’ve been using in one form or another for almost 20 years. For the last 5, it has resided in Obsidian, which I access almost exclusively through my Android phone, although I also use vim when I’m working on a computer that has a keyboard.
The public-facing side of all this is being driven by Hugo, which takes any notes I’ve flagged for public consumption and builds my new website from them. If you’re reading this and you aren’t me, chances are high that you’re viewing the results of that pipeline now. :-)
This project stream will be about my adventures shoe-horning Hugo into my existing Obsidian workflow.
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.
The plan is to deploy this site to a robust HTML-only server, which will keep costs down and security high, since there won’t be any programmatic interfaces on the site itself that can be hacked. My deployment engine of choice is simple: I’ll be using git push. But before I sign up for a hosting account and start pushing my brains out the door on an automated basis, I wanted to test that procedure on a smaller scale, here in the lab.
I’ve mentioned that this will be my primary (and possibly only) presence on the web. But if it’s going to support all the different things I want to do, it’ll have to be pretty powerful. After implementing a basic “everything” feed, I sat down and sketched out what a more nuanced system might look like.