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.
Now that I’ve identified a useable hosting candidate, my final test of their service will be to roll out a full implementation of the websmith deployment scheme. But in contemplating how I’m going to do that, I’ve realized that I may not have broken the project into distinct repos properly. So I’m going to figure it out by explaining it to the rubber duck. (Meaning you. :-)
With most of the content and features now working, it’s time to choose a hosting partner. Given recent politics, I’m inclined to limit my search to Canadian providers, but I’m not willing to compromise on the few services and features I require. First on the list to explore was HostPapa.
Squirrel! Over the last day or two, the spotlight of my attention has been distracted by something shiny - getting new content ready for the FrankenTongues project. It’s content to feed a feature I’ve been wanting for some time now, and today I’ve been reacquainting myself with Frankie’s code so that I’ll be able to do something useful with that content when it’s ready. In the process, I’ve noticed that my memory for details no longer has the stamina for juggling so many projects. I can’t remember how things are organized or why things were done the way I did them, even though it was only a month ago that I did it.
But surprisingly, I think this could be a good thing.