Updating my Web Presence - again
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It's been around a year since I updated my web presence, and I did it again.
A year ago, I moved from GitHub Pages with the then-default, Jekyll, to omg.lol and bearblog.dev. I used omg.lol for my /now page as well as a profile page, and I moved a selection of blog posts to bearblog.dev (and bought flenker.blog to go with it).
This time around, I move away from both of these platforms to a setup that involves Obsidian, a plugin called Digital Garden and GitHub Pages. If you are interested, I am describing my setup here.
Here's why:
- GitHub Pages has gotten better. A key grievance I had back then was the fact that I needed to use Jekyll, which was cumbersome to use especially on the fly or from Mobile. At the very least, I needed to create a file in a specific format with some boilerplate contents, either on GitHub or in the repository. If I wanted to cross-link to another entry, I'd have to remember a specific syntax and use it, or prepare for a build failure. This is no longer the case, I can now publish my stuff right out of my favorite note-taking tool, Obsidian.
- omg.lol is slow. It was slow from the beginning, but I joined while it was under a DDOS attack and hoped the speed issues would resolve after the attack was over. That did not happen. My profile page wasn't very data-heavy, but to this day, loading takes significant time.
- Markdown isn't Markdown. All three tools - Obsidian, Bear Blog and omg.lol - use markdown. This should make it easy to prepare texts in one tool and copy-paste it over, but it isn't. omg.lol has a special syntax to style bullet points - for example, you can end a bullet point with {ghost} to make it show up like - well - a ghost. But this feature was even inconsistent within the various omg.lol tidbits, and also the documentation was hard to find. Bear Blog has (or had) issues with tables under certain circumstances, meaning that I can't rely on the markdown looking similar to what I have seen in my editor. With the new setup, I only have one source of grief instead of three.
- The setup was too constraining. Want to update your omg.lol /now page with an image? Good luck with that. Speaking of images, the image handling on bearblog is also a bit weird. So if I was on vacation and wanted to share a great picture on my /now page, then - well, I couldn't. Now I can.
- I was chasing my own information. OK, this one is a bit embarrassing. I sometimes find useful tidbits and information, and I'd like to share them. The latest one is a useful multi-line regex. But when I want to look it up - where do I look? If it's not in Obsidian, did I post it to Bear Blog? On Mastodon? Did I plan to publish it and forgot? Who knows. I spend an ungodly amount of time just hunting down my own pieces of information. With the new setup, all of this is just a small search away.
I hope to be able to add more content in the future. After all, I can now do it also from mobile. Fingers crossed!
philippflenker.com was last updated .
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