Digital Notebook - Project Notes

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My notebook (the website you are currently on) is a wiki-like digital knowledge base. I manage the files with Obsidian. The site is generated by Eleventy, hosted on GitHub, and published with Digital Ocean as a subdomain of my main site.

The idea behind a wiki-like knowledge-base is to make it easier draw connections between ideas, even (especially?) disparate ones. This is facilitated by backlinks, which are links that link to the current page.

Wikilinks

Backlinks are almost universally handled with wikilinks. (Though I don't really understand why. I don't see what's special about wikilinks beyond the syntax, and I don't actually find the syntax all that convenient. I must be missing something.) The problem is that wikilinks aren't a native markdown feature, so any given site generator (like Eleventy) isn't going to know what to do with them.

Luckily for me, Juan Frank had already figured this out in his Eleventy Foam Template. What his solution didn't account for, as far as I could tell, was placeholder text. So a wikilink that looked like this [[note|link text]] would render like that on the page. With Claude's help, I added a regex to remove the pipe and the text to the left of it.

Private Notes

There are some notes I don't want to publish, but I'd prefer to keep them with the rest of my notes so I can link to them. For my purposes, the solution wasn't too complicated. I store my private notes in a private folder, then add that folder to .gitignore, which also automatically adds it to .eleventyignore. This means the private folder won't be uploaded to GitHub, and it won't be written to Eleventy's site output.

On the 404 page, I tell users to check the url. If it includes /private/, they've stumbled on a private note.

This only works if you're okay with keeping your private notes in a specific folder. A more flexible approach would be to include a private key in a note's frontmatter, and use that to filter it from git and the site output. Though as you can see in my notes on the subject, this is more complicated than it sounds.

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