Early Research

Some early research on tooling for creating a Digital Garden. I’ve eventually settled on creating a Digital Garden with Hugo as described here.

Requirements

• Must have
  • Ingests a folder tree of markdown files. Alternatively, ingests a flat folder of markdown files with titles in Dendron format
  • Index/Toc pane to the left
  • ToC for note to the right
  • Backlinks at the bottom of the page
  • Search through note titles as well as contents
  • Support for images and other media in the notes
• Nice to have
  • (Almost a must-have) Auto-numbering of headings and sub-headings
  • (Almost a must-have) A section for Recent updates/changes.. maybe on the landing page, if not in a sidebar?
  • Visualization of inter-note links
  • Callouts like “Info” “Warning etc.”
  • Commenting system
  • Light mode, dark mode, auto mode between light and dark
  • A “back to top” button that appears after a bit of scrolling down.

Tools

• Obsidian Publish

  • Gold standard?
  • Costly
  • No built in commenting system

• https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/

  • Potential candidate to make a digital garden from a folder of markdown files
  • Ends up with a layout very similar to what I want
    • Index/ToC panel to the left
    • ToC for note to the right
    • Missing backlinks at the bottom
    • Seems to have good looking “callouts” like “NOTE” or “WARNING” etc.
    • Seems to have search
    • Even some sort of commenting system
    • No visualization of network though
    • DEALBREAKER: No backlinks :-(
      • But maybe this helps. Someone tried making backlinks work with Mkdocks and it actually works - even provides some context around the backlinks. https://github.com/sjmarshy/note-link-janitor
  • See here an example: https://jackiexiao.github.io/foam/
  • Someone even made a blog using this: https://ultrabug.fr/Tech%20Blog/2021/2021-03-12-from-wordpress-to-mkdocs/
    • Which uses this plugin to customize navigation content based on the current page: https://github.com/lukasgeiter/mkdocs-awesome-pages-plugin

• Could use Eleventy

  • With this template: https://github.com/binyamin/eleventy-garden
  • https://github.com/martinjc/programming-intro
    • Example site made with Eleventy that has a navigation sidebar
  • https://harrycresswell.com/writing/getting-started-with-eleventy/
    • Good guide to getting started with Eleventy

• Quartz

  • Uses Hugo as an alternative to Obsidian Publish
  • Is missing the visualization bit
  • Not sure it has the ToC/Index panel to the right

• https://github.com/aquilesC/static_website_builder

  • Simple static site generater built from scratch by some guy in Python
  • Has backlinks

• Tiddlywiki ?

• https://github.com/mdzk-rs/mdzk

  • Example: https://notes.alanmbarr.com/
  • https://www.alanmbarr.com/blog/digital-garden-gitpod-mdzk/
  • No backlinks?

• Emanote: https://www.srid.ca/emanote

  • Written in Haskell
  • Has backlinks
  • CSS/presentation is a little amateur-ish?
  • No index panel to the left?

• Hugo with suitable theme?

  • Using a theme like book, docsy, Eureka. Docsy is really good.
  • See theme Mainroad for inspiration on how to create a site similar to my current Wordpress site
  • https://seds.nl/notes/export_org_roam_backlinks_with_gohugo/
    • Example of how to create backlinks?
  • https://github.com/kausalflow/connectome
    • A hugo theme that supports backlinks (and forward links)
  • https://anaulin.org/blog/hugo-raw-html-shortcode/
    • A useful way to add raw html to Hugo markdown

People who could help

• https://sia.codes/
  • Person who seems familiar with eleventy and might be available for hire to build needed tooling
• https://george.mand.is/hire

Backlinks

• Hugo