Project: Websmith Plumbing

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Project WebSmith is about more than just creating a website. It’s about creating a thought-tracking system that lets me take my existing note-keeping system - where I track on many independent ideas and projects - and extend it to share selected entries publicly. So when I say “websmith,” I don’t only mean the worldwide web - I also mean 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.

Project Update Posts

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Changing Horses

After spending half a day diving deeper into Nikola’s theme engine and the archive of available themes, I’ve had second thoughts about hitching my cart to the Nikola pony. It’s perfectly functional, but to get anything close to the layout I’m aiming for, I would have to build an awful lot of the front end myself. For both the desktop and mobile contexts. And if I’m being honest, I don’t have much interest in that particular adventure. I’d rather adapt something that’s already close. So here I go, back into the static site generator dating market.

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Comment System

Disqus was a disappointment. I last looked at it a couple of years ago, and found it to be serviceable then, but it seems to have taken a slide onto the slums of the web, and is now covered in ads and unresponsive web pages. Not the kind of image that makes me think they’ll value the privacy of my guests. But I’ve found a different solution…

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Cousin of the Skunk

After trying a few different schemes for generating bag names, I’ve made some further decisions about how the system will work. Not as automated as I’d hoped, but not as manual as I’d feared…