I need to be able to create some projects, such as my daily Maranga challenge, that will get a new post every day, but I don’t want those auto-pages filling up my Obsidian notebook system. Here’s how I’m planning to manage that.
Project: Websmith Plumbing
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.
Project Log Entries
Tricky Shadow
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.
Controlling Images
I’m trying to keep the web system simple. At the moment, I can write one of these updates in about 3 minutes. It’s a great way to summarize my progress and think through next steps, then push them out to the public stream for anyone who might be following along.