An Eleventy powered second brain that is optimized to be used alongside of Obsidian and your own Local AI.
It's also an excuse to try out the Polar open source funding platform for real.
First Post
I used the update / blog / newsletter feature of Polar to write an initial post. You can use the "Follow" subscription tier to get updates by email.
Hi! I'm Boris Mann and I've been blogging for almost 25 years. It's time to go all in on JavaScript and Markdown, powered by the Eleventy static site generator and it's all JS pipeline.
And, to build the combination blog and second brain foundation that includes and acknowledges LLMs as part of workflows. — The words I've written, exported, imported, transformed, and ported between platforms have survived most durably as plaintext files.
These days, they're written mostly in Markdown, often using Obsidian, LogSeq, or TiddlyWiki, or even just my VS Code editor.
I've written and re-written my personal site over the years, and have been stuck in the combo of Liquid templates and Ruby-powered Jekyll. Every new OS release means figuring out how to get nokogiri to compile correctly.
And, my entire archive of 1000s of notes makes Jekyll preview builds take forever, especially when I'm also generating graph interconnections that power visualizations and backlinks between pages.
So, rather than bouncing between Markdown, YAML, Liquid, Jekyll, and Ruby, the goal is to have everything in Markdown, powered by 11ty, which uses JS for everything.
And LLM support? Well, thanks to lots of discussions (especially with @heyellieday, I think the giga-brain option here is that these tools can mix everything into and out of Markdown really easily.
I also wanted an excuse to try out Polar "for real". I've created an empty repo, seeded it with a few issues, and setup some options for getting involved. Sound interesting? Start by following the newsletter here, browse the issues, and write up your own "wishlist" features.
If you're an experienced 11ty and/or JavaScript developer, have a look at which of the issues you might want to tackle.
Logo
This stunning Tools for Thought Rocks inspired brain / wikilinks / possum graphic is by me and some font and layer settings in PhotoPea.
