Big Plan

Problems

My prefered note app is Bear. Bear isn’t exstinsible. It doesn’t have plug-ins to format file names. It organizes notes by nested tags. And it’s backlink system isn’t great.

I’ve decided to work with Jekyll to build a digital garden type site. Out of the box, it does a good job with Bear’s markdown exports. I can accomplish the basics of a site without too drastic changes to my workflow.

But to reduce friction, some work needs doing to make Bear and Jekyll work together, and make my life easy—cause I really have no interest in constantly working to put posts up. The tool isn’t the point. Carpenters don’t swing hammers because they love the tool. They use the hammer as tool to build something.

Normally this would be managed in Things, but it’s a good execuse to get to know Jekyll.

Tasks

These are the initial problems I see. But from only a few hours of playing with the system. Todos are laid out in the order I feel are most important to work on to acheive the bang for the buck.

• Bear exports markdown files as simple “File Name.md” files. Jekyll only parses files with “yyyy-mm-dd-file-name.md.” Create a target directory for Bear exported .md files to automaticaly parse date from the front matter header, rename to “yyyy-mm-dd-title.md”, move to jekyll.
  • When pulling .date with yq from a md file’s front matter, it returns the date plus the text after it, i.e, the entire file.
  • Strip special characters from and shorten the new filename. Bear defaults to naming exports as the first sentence of the note, which can be long and unwieldy.
  • Trigger renaming script when a Bear note is exported.
• Move the jekyll skeleton to NAS
• trigger a build and rsync to production server when files are altered.
• Implement backlinking. This will probably require a change to my workflow, when incorporating the reference in a note, but adding making the backlink visible on the sending page would be nice.
  • Kagi Search
  • https://terminaladdict.com/jekyll/development/2021/02/05/Jekyll-Backlinks.html
  • Mention other pages linking to current page
  • https://www.daniel.industries/2023/01/29/really-basic-backlinks-in-jekyll/
• Bear’s tagging system is based on #hashtags. Jekyll looks for “tags:” in the front matter header. Bear ignores #hashtags in the front matter header. Find/build a hook to parse Bear’s inline tags and add them to jeykll’s system. Something like mynux/jekyll- hashtags
• Generate tag pages and a tag cloud, along the lines of:
  • How do I tag posts in Jekyll? Jekyll tagging made simple.
  • https://blog.lunarlogic.com/2019/managing-tags-in-jekyll-blog-easily/
  • Managing tags in Jekyll blog easily
  • pattex/jekyll-tagging: Jekyll plugin to automatically generate a tag cloud and tag pages.
• Add ActivityPub ‘cause Mastodon is where I’m most present.
  • Kagi Search
  • https://macwright.com/2022/12/09/activitypub
  • A Guide to Implementing ActivityPub in a Static Site (or Any Website) — Part 4
  • Jekyll Activity Pub
• Broad categories/collections? This might be quick and easy.
• Basic customization.
• Live.fm sidebar with latest songs played
• Replace cp with rsync in the renaming shell script.
• Add a hook to change Bear’s [[Note Name]] backlink convention to Jeykll’s [Name of Link]({\% post_url 2010-07-21-name-of-post \%})

#globalcowpie