Development Log

Work 🪵

Sept - Oct

• cleaned up a lot of content
• added a lot of content
• added support for video and audio assets in media
• lots of style nits
• refined auto-tagging
• refined gallery creation
• made collections templates
• improved, expanded feeds
• launched!

Aug - Sept 2023

• started filling up Memex
• soft launched on mmmx.cloud
• Began Big Table, integrated with memex
• Porting content from garden.nimdaghlian.com to mememx
• added categories
• re-integrated Backlinks from digital-garden-template
• thought way too much about categorization
• added basic plugins to make index pages for all tags and categories
• made sync script to smooth out the workflow of writing in Obsidian and publishing in Jekyll – should preserve backlinks and image links as long as I’m minimally mindful easier to do it manually right now

Spring - Summer 2023

• Worked on moving from the test garden to a permanent memex-style site.
• Started fresh jekyll site outside of digital-garden-template
• Converted getfeeds to a plugin
• Refactored site to use Fomantic for most structure / styles
• Added customized version of blocks.css
• Made base gallery template
• Wrote make-gallery plugin to generate galleries and asset notes from directories of assets
• Wrote make-index plugin to generate site-index.json for dynamic pagination
• Added image resizing plugin

Jan 2023

• Built bloggy.garden to be a dedicated site for feed reading.

Sept - Oct 2022

Built getimgs.rb to do something similar with directories of images:

• define image groups in _config.yml like so

galleries:
  - name: "Everything In My Wife's Bag Two Days After We Got Married"
    directory: "wife-bag"
    tags: ["drawing", "art", "Martha"]

• run from root like getfeeds.rb
• outputs .md files with boilerplate frontmatter in the _galleries collection for each image
• makes notes for each gallery linked to their corresponding collections

Started work in earnest on a new visual theme.

• layout bucket-gallery establishes visual styles
  • text, background, highlight, border, and background svg color can be set by a single page var in frontmatter – [[ everything-in-my-wifes-bag-two-days-after-we-got-married|example ]]
• Made a new version of the home page using plant sprites for notes and feeds

Mid-April 2022

Built getfeeds.rb to create markdown files based on external RSS feeds with basic metadata. Script run manually while experimenting, not yet integrated with the Jekyll build process or plugin-ified yet. A lot of this was done on the Amtrak back from [[ expoch-go-2022|Expo Chicago ]]

Use

Add feeds you want to import to _config.yml

feeds:
  - name: "Astronomy Picture of the Day"
    feed: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod.rss
    bucket: "Astronomy Picture of the Day"
    tags: ["space", "science"]

Running ruby getfeeds.rb from the root directory does the following:

• puts feeds in their own collection: _feeds
• That way they don’t spam the notes graph
• It then makes notes for every bucket and tag on any feed
• This way you can see your buckets on the graph, and link to them
• Those notes use the layouts bucket-garden or tag-garden (newly added) to list everything with that bucket or tag
• Those layouts have been updated to also include notes, pages, and posts, should any be tagged or bucketed

Also set up a free, no-code deployment solution for my buddy Evan. Foresty to edit, Render to host, tracked on Github

This remains experimental given how much overhead it creates for site rendering. Very much thinking of creating a separate install just for feeds.