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.
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.
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.
This guy looks happy, and he should, because he’s the newly selected poster boy for the system that will generate new Maranginator game bags. Confused? Me too. Come on inside and let’s figure out what I’m talking about.