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.
In a previous post, I worked out the general process by which I’ll be creating the daily challenge bag names for Maranginator, but now I have to sketch out an implementation with specific tools, algorithms, and processes. Furthermore, the Maranga newsletter is just one of several content streams I’m envisioning, and I want this system to be able to handle all of them.
Creating that Jeff-to-Nikola translator wasn’t too bad, but I did run into a headache trying to figure out how to structure my shadow files to conform to what Nikola is looking for. I read somewhere that Nikola could be told to search through the content directories recursively and that it happily consumed metadata in YAML format, so that’s what I set up.
For the last week, I’ve been modifying the checklist rather than posting individual progress updates, but with that list narrowing now, its worth checking in and discussing the thornier bits that remain.