Flowershow - Present your Digital Garden

🚩 DEPRECATED 2022-07-06. See https://github.com/flowershow/flowershow

Why

Job Story

When I have a bunch of notes in markdown files

I want to publish (some) of them online in an elegant website

So that I can share nicely presented material with others

SCQH

SCQH (70%): flowershow-why-scqh

Plan

Purpose and Principles

Turn content in a repo in a functional, elegant website. Aka:

• Make a beautiful "Digital garden"
• Make your "second brain" explorable by others
• Obsidian publish alternative that is open source and customizable

Functional and elegant means:

• Clean
• Beautiful
• Dark/light theme
• Great navigation
• Supports obsidian for authoring plus key plugins like zotero connector bibliographic references

Brainstorm and Organize

Potential starting points (in no order)

• Landing page for the product See flowershow-landing-page
• Basic working product e.g. command line tool, template etc See flowershow-v0.1
• Dogfooding product e.g. on flowershow itself or building Life Itself new community site. Possible candidates
  • web3 (refactor)
  • life itself new community site
  • flowershow site itself

Design

Page Rendering

An illustration of the basic page rendering functionality:

Key design choices

• Content comes from markdown on disk or structured data e.g. json (Future: Could come from an API but we are then heading into richer territory)
• Support MDX - i.e. enhanced markdown with a suite of out of the box components
• Orient to a leading digital knowledge tool e.g. Obsidian

Site Rendering

What things do we want that weave pages together?

• Index pages e.g. list of all concepts
• Blog sections or latest updates section

That requires some kind of search/index.

How do we support that?

• What database/index do we need? What content layer do we need? 👉 Content Layer API. To summarize here options are:
  • Roll our own (inspired by Obsidian metadata cache?)
  • Use contentlayer.dev
  • Use tina.io
• What frontend framework? Use Next by default (maybe svelte if we were feeling fancy)
• What remark parsers?

Notes

Challenge of upgrading the template app - 2022-05-09

Technical Architecture 2022-05-06

Brainstorm - 2022-03-22