My digital garden

What is this digital garden?

• I don't write nearly as much as I used to.
• A significant reason for this is the bar for entry.
  • Writing long-form blog articles takes too dang long, and a lot of effort.
  • But I have lots of thoughts throughout the day that would be fine as short-form posts.
  • And I like the idea of building drafts of longer-form writing in public.
  • Plus, short-form in the form of social media posts feels dead to me at this point. No engagement, and I change main drivers every 6 months.
• Soooooo I've set up this digital garden, using Obsidian, and the Digital Garden extension to publish it.

Things to do beyond the default setup

• Get timestamps displaying
  • This was a setting that I overlooked.
• Add a display for all content? Most of it is currently orphaned because I don't do a lot of cross-note linking
  • Even though Anne-Laure says I shouldn't keep orphan notes
  • This was accomplished by enabling more settings that I'd overlooked.
• Ensure there is a solid sitemap & RSS feed
  • I needed to configure the base URL in the extension settings in order for it to generate these.
    • And to configure the base URL, I needed an actual URL. So I promoted the site to a custom subdomain in netlify.
  • There was a bug with the RSS feed: the generator was removing the self-close slash from link elements
    • As discussed in that thread, the solution was to use five slashes to escape one slash. Obligatory Onion reference.
    • My commit: https://github.com/pepopowitz/digital-garden/commit/4397077e599e237586dce9d2e2dc08b64d7c7741
• fix horrible contrast of header for the theme I'm using (RetroNotes)
  • (and other elements that weren't initially enabled)
  • (and move the header element to the actual site header rather than the page content heading)
  • Commit: https://github.com/pepopowitz/digital-garden/commit/f21fa399335494d505f0f81fc4837bea214f3030
  • I still don't know why but I struggled with specificity on the header h1. I had to give the element a class in order to target it without the base CSS being somehow more specific.
• Prove in Obsidian that I can easily create content here & link to it from my daily notes
• Fix contrast of search results
• Issue: having the notes repo open on multiple computers results in them fighting over timestamps.
  • this plugin might help: https://github.com/lighthousedino/obsidian-front-matter-timestamps
• Meta tags & opengraph data
  • see https://dg-docs.ole.dev/advanced/note-specific-settings/#metatags
• Social sharing image
• Add a header to link it back to my blog/site
• Add a link to it in my site's header
• favicon
• logo, branding
• Add a feed somewhere for most recent updates
• Use tags?
• Automate posting updates to socials?
• Annoying bug: when writing content on one machine, and then pulling it to a second, it updates the created/edited timestamps.
• Annoying bug (website): all headings are the same size 😭