Holiday Blog Tinkering

I didn't get much blog tinkering done over the holidays, other than just barely opening my code editor and making a new branch, deciding to delete my archive from this site, and see if Obsidian can work for what it's intended to be: a fancy Markdown editor!

This is my January 1st log of things to look at and what I'm planning to do.

Obsidian

I've long "held out" against Obsidian. I tried it, it was fine, but after many years of rolling my own sites with Jekyll and Markdown it didn't feel like much of a difference.

I want the type of graph structure that LogSeq and other advanced systems do, with full block based systems, not just pages of Markdown on disk.

But! Pages of Markdown on disk does accurately describe what I do when I'm working on this site, especially on desktop.

We're also using Obsidian at Fission as of December 2023, for our product planning process. We bought licenses for the whole team and are using git for multiplayer.

IndieKit

I've gone back and forth on using IndieKit. The main thing it brings is a Micropub interface for mobile posting to this site. And with LogSeq not really working for me for that, and Noosphere not being quite ready, maybe I bring back journals here.

I've been using and paying for Micro.blog for this for my personal blog, and I've been enjoying the cross posting – posts get sent to Bluesky and Mastodon (and Nostr and Tumbler and LinkedIn).

Cloudron

I'm going to make a Cloudron page here, because I've been learning and experimenting and raving about it for 3 months or so.

I had tried it some time ago and recently re-committed to it in a big way. I've got a personal install I call the Commons Computer, installed it for CoSocial, installed it for Fission, and have an IPFS community one that isn't quite active yet.

LogSeq (and Noosphere and Linkding and…)

What about my notes site powered by LogSeq? Do I … migrate all the notes back here? it's probably a good idea to have a separate notes site which is more ephemeral than this. But maybe everything is ephemeral???

The other other thing I meant to do over the holidays was install the commandline Noosphere tooling. I'm in the beta, so have the Subconscious iOS app, and being able to perhaps use Noosphere for syncing between desktop and mobile would be good, without doing the Working Copy git client on my phone.

And finally, I have a shared bookmarking service Linkding installed on Commons Computer. You can browse shared bookmarks here.

Do I need another place to stash bookmarks? Part of the thinking of IndieKit and Journals on this site, is that notes-as-bookmarks / journals-with-links are a good place for them, and yet another service is just another spot for them to never get looked at again.

Eleventy

One of the other solutions for how long it takes to build this site, and perhaps for more advanced "stuff", is perhaps to move it to Eleventy. But that's going to take a lot more coding and learning time, although I did capture some Eleventy bookmarks.

Addendum Jan 3rd, 2024

OK, I went back and forth from this being a "blog" vs a journal.

Now that I've got the Obsidian "unique note creator" creating datestamped journal entries that are more "block" sized, this giant post makes more sense as a "blog". And maybe, since I do have a Obsidian on mobile via git, there really isn't much pressure to move on IndieKit.

And the one new person who subscribed to my feed will get it via RSS!

I'll add a feed for journals…but may use that just to import / cross-post via Micro.blog, and invite people to follow my Mastodon account (which also has an RSS feed!).

I likely won't add a feed for notes, as they get "edited in place". I have the five most recently updated on the home page, just as a way to surface things for those who truly come in through the home page. And, new notes will often get created / noted via journal posts, so people will get links to them that way.

Perhaps weekly blog post summaries. We'll see!

I'm itchy at how many wikilinks point over to the LogSeq notes site, but re-importing those back over here – again! – is a big project.