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.
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.
I’ve been working lately on the system for showcasing completed projects and have been wrestling with the whole naming scheme conundrum. Today I made some key choices, and it affects more than just names. I’ve changed the way I think about products too.
Today started with a bit of AI exploration looking at a bunch of layout concepts for the look of the new website’s landing page. Lots of weird and head-scratching proposals were made, but this one has some stickiness to it. I had been thinking that the featured article would be on the left, and the smaller “other” article boxes would be on the right, but now I’m digging this proposal, with the feature right in the middle of an expanded banner section.