What's Going On Here?

This site has been here for a long time. It's supposed to do two things; be a place to share tecchy information, and somewhere I can document how to do things which I know I'll forget about later. It has a search function for a reason!

Over the past few years, I've found myself making plenty of notes, in Notes, but never actually putting them on the website. Once I noticed, I tried to figure out why. It boiled down to one simple thing.

I hate writing in Textpattern.

More specifically, I hate writing in Textile, on Textpattern.

That's a problem. This website is built using Textpattern and Textile is the markup language it uses for writing articles. Nuts. It also made me a bit sad, because Textpattern has worked so well, so reliably, and was conceived "for content publishers to Just Write". I've found it impossible to use for that purpose for many years.

Workarounds

These days the Markdown markup language is pretty ubiquitous, so even my Solution Two was thwarted when I considered finding a text editor with a nice interface in which I could write my notes and simply have it barf out the Textile for me to copy-pasta into Textpattern.

Being the over-entitled swine I am, I also had delusions of something into which I could drag-and-drop images that would miraculously optimise themselves, save into a local location, and be ready for upload. What did I think this was, the nineties?

If I couldn't do those things, I reckoned it would have to be some online publishing thing. Throw away Textpattern and redevelop the site (the style of which I still enjoy) in some hosted service. After all, one online editor I actually like to use is the little one built-in to Discourse, which does everything I ask of it with aplomb. Shame I would have to deploy a massive forum platform, then mercilessly hack at the thing until it represented a home-cooked weblog. Couldn't do that, it just goes against the grain.

The closest things I discovered to the writing simplicity I craved were pika.page, Quotion, and Write.as. Pika handled the images the best. Quotion was snazzy because I could just shuffle my Apple Notes around and voilà ! Instablog! Write.as has a lovely writing interface, and there's WriteFreely which allows you to self-host. That's awesome.

But customisation? I mean... making-a-varying-number-of-birds-appear-on-the-wires-in-the-background-level customisation? Hell, no. Even editing the damn footer is near impossible on some of these platforms, even when you're paying for them! That's... dumb.

Moon on a stick, this lad.

You're Holding It Wrong

But wait! What's this!

Yes, it's wet_textfilter_markdown, of course it is!

As you may be able to tell, the site is still running on Textpattern. I mean, it's not outwardly changed in any significant way. I've spent a bunch of time distancing it from the various plugins I've used over the years as their developers have vanished into the ether, so I was hesitant to approach a new one. But this one is on GitHub! And was updated a mere two years ago!

And it only flippin' works.

Discovering this plugin changed the game. Now I was pretty certain I could find a desktop editor that would export or use Markdown natively. Something I could use for note taking on the fly and tidy up later. Maybe even do something with images!

With the terms of the search duly modified, I quickly found Obsidian. It's funny to discover something so hugely supported, which has been out there solving problems for years, and yet I'd never heard a peep about it.

This thing has such comprehensive configuration, and so many community plugins (yes, I know, out of one plugin frying pan, into the other plugin fire) that I had high hopes it would meet my lofty requirements. I barely know how the thing works, but the plentiful options got it pared down more to my level. I then added the community Editing Toolbar and Image Converter.

The Editing Toolbar was a no-brainer given my limited Markdown experience. The Image Converter is an absolute saviour, able to do all the things I assumed nobody else in the world would be so pernickety to require. Look!

I can specify output paths and filenames with variables! Add automatic conversion and optimisations! I can take a screenshot... and just paste it into the editor. And that's all.

Genius.

Barf

And how to get all this magnificence onto the site, I hear you cry! Surely a tumult of FTPs, SFTPs, WebDAVs, and suchlike?

blw

Three letters in the Terminal. It's in my .bash_functions file, and it looks like this:

blw() {
  rsync -avz --delete "/Users/andy/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents/BirdsLikeWires/" birdslikewires@birdslikewires.net:/home/birdslikewires/birdslikewires.net/obsidian/
  open https://birdslikewires.net/obsidian
}

I know, that iCloud file path is dumb as chips. But it lets me keep my Vaults (that's the Obsidian term for... well, a bunch of related files) in sync across devices.

Oh, yeah - I've just switched over to my iPad.

And, yeah, that's a pasted screenshot following all the same rules as on the desktop.

Kaboom.

I type those three letters, hit return, the content gets uploaded to the obsidian directory on the server (all key controlled, no password nonsense) and it opens in the browser, ready for me to pasta that text straight into Textpattern.

Images work because there's a symbolic link called content in the web root, pointing to the obsidian/content directory. That keeps the relative paths saved by Obsidian happy.

And How Is It?

No idea.

It's very late, I've just written this, and I'm going to type those three letters in a second to pop everything online. I'm still in the midst of a gentle site remodelling, with an eye squarely on full-content RSS / ATOM support. I know my website style won't be for everyone, but I'd still like to give people access to the content if they'd like it.

Who knows, maybe now I'll have more motivation to get those notes out here again. Feels like the web could do with some more independent bobbins on it, and I'd be happy to oblige.