Just created a subdomain with my notes, or wiki, or digital garden. Whatever you want to call it. It’s mostly for personal reference if I need it, but you can take a look too 😉

So… replying to myself. Probably what I’m going to do is quite similar to what I had before: statically generate the notes from source markdown (or something else). I first need to decide the best language. Markdown is simples, yes, but sometimes I feel I need to add HTML to make it look exactly how I want it to. For example, I can’t just do this in markdown without using HTML. Some other markup languages allow for much more customization, such as Asciidoc.

Let me review the features I wrote yesterday to know if I can accomplish what I want this way. First, the must-haves:

Self hosted and open source Notes stored in plain text files Backlinking feature Supports LaTeX math Supports Mermaid diagrams

Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes even if I have to create some script to adapt it to whatever static website generator I’m using. Unfortunately Hugo does not easily allow me to process backlinks on its own. I may try a different, more flexible, static generator for this. It’s an experiment and that way I’ll learn more. Maybe Gatsby or even Eleventy.

Clean layout and possible to easily edit on mobile

Yes and kinda. Need to find a good app. There’s some such as iA Writer that I know work very well. But I need to find a way to make it easily work with a Git repository.

Web editor (maybe WYSIWYG)

GitHub editor works. Not WYSIWYG though.

Simple and humanly readable markup language (markdown or other)

Yes.

Search

Can be implemented, although a bit harder.

Now let’s finally review the good to have features.

Full-text search

Can be implemented too.

Mind map visualization

Yes.

Public/private stuff

Possible, harder, but possible.

That’s really interesting. Even though my mother tongue is clearly not English, sometimes I find it much easier to express some thoughts in English rather in Portuguese. I feel the best for me would be to write in both at the same time but that’s obviously not good for readers 😂

Wow! Thanks Jan. I’m still trying to understand why replacing links that start with / work because my feed was printing relative URLs with ... It seems to work though. I’m happy 🤯

There are some srcsets from some older articles that have relative URLs but let’s hope no one will take a look at those old posts. Maybe I’ll try to figure out a way to parse those attributes. Would be a bit more complicated though.

Love the animated GIFs! The background!

Thanks 😁

One thing: my feed reader has a hard time handling the relative image URLs in your RSS…

Thanks for letting me know that. I didn’t know that was an issue. May I ask which RSS reader you’re using? That’ll be hard to do with Hugo. There’s no way to tell it to use absolute URLs in the feeds only. I’ll need to set up an extra step of some kind. I’ll check it out.

(Also, I couldn’t help but notice that RSS items lack the “context” that makes replies and such so much more understandable. Not a huge issue, just thought I’d let you know.)

Interesting, I noticed today my ActivityPub feeds had that problem and I already fixed them to include the “reply” part. I’m not aware if the RSS can have that kind of context. Can they? Also, just checked and the JSON feeds don’t support that kind of things. However, my page’s all use microformats and I just checked and they’re correctly parsed.

Shower thought: do you think the boxes with context about replies, likes and reposts are needed? I’m trying to reduce the complexity and cut edges that I don’t think are needed. I could just re-style it in a way to show that it is a like or repost with a link without the “entire” information - which, most of the times, is not the entire stuff because I set a maximum length.

If you’re reading this, what’s your opinion? Is it really required? Do you find it useful? Or just pretty?

The IndieWeb own-your-data-thing can be complicated sometimes. Since there are no full fledged systems that allow us to interact with other social media without having to implement it ourselves, sometimes we get to the point where we feel kind of limited. I’m trying not to use other services or, if I do, I’m just POSSE’ing to them. Sometimes it’s hard because there are communities that are more connected on some social media (e.g., Twitter) and the bridge is not always perfect.

Edit: I just hope someday we can have a federated social network that can easily interact with all others…

I’m thinking about adding a photos page to this website and start using Instagram less and less for that purpose. I’d like to serve them with the best resolution possible (not directly, but through a link) but some of them occupy several megabytes of space and I can’t afford to add that to Git. In addition, Hugo doesn’t seem to play well with Git LFS.

I thought about using BunnyCDN’s image optimization service to provide images in different formats and sizes but that costs 9.5€ a month and I do believe that that would be much more than what I need. Hugo’s capable of generating all the pictures I need. However, there’s the space problem. Where do I put them?

Also, do you use any CDN? If so, how do you backup the data you have on it?