Leon Mika

Moved TIL Computer over to a new technology stack. Yes, again. This frickin’ site, and it’s spiritual predecessor, has seen a few tech stacks transitions recently it’s surprising that I haven’t significantly lost anything (apart from the post dates). The main reason is that I can’t decide if this should be a blog or a wiki. The site contains the accumulation of lessons learnt and other bits of knowledge acquired as part of my software engineering job, so having a way to quickly access something is moderately important. The pages themselves are relatively long-lived, and somewhat evergreen, so there’s not a huge temporal access: one could argue that an RSS feed would be unnecessary. However, I do want that buzz from seeing something I publish show up in an RSS reader, so one would be nice. Hence the reason why this site was principally a blog for most of it’s existence.

That’s why my interest was piqued when I saw Jessica Smith’s post on how she moved her site to Quartz. After some investigation into Quartz’s features, including how well it works with Obsidian, it seemed enough of an improvement to try out.

So I took an export of the old site, previously hosted on Micro.blog, and imported the markdown files into a new Obsidian vault. It was also an opportunity to finish fixing up the posts that were still encoded in HTML from the previous export, which I didn’t get around to fixing when I imported them into Micro.blog:

The Obsidian vault was then added to a Git repository, which’ll get pushed to my Forgejo instance when the site is to be republished. Doing so will run a CI/CD pipeline which will download Quartz, prepare a new workspace, copy the Obsidian vault into the “content” directory, copy the config and layout files, build the site, and then push it to Netlify. This is probably not the recommended approach, but I’m very interested in making sure the Git repository is as close to the original Obsidian vault as possible. I plan to relay on Obsidian and it’s vault sync for writing the site’s content, so anything that could be done to avoid disrupting that is welcomed.

The layout isn’t too far from the default, apart from some light changes to the colouring, font, and layout. I already like the wiki-style sidebar on the left, which would make finding things easier. The fact that I was more-or-less limited to reverse chronological posts list was one of the downsides of the blog-style approach (well, that’s not entirely true: I could’ve adjusted the template to be more wiki-like. I just never got around to doing so).

I also simplified the information design a little. The original idea I had was to separate guides from references and “cheatsheets,” a post type that was never really defined well. But I found that I preferred just lumping the posts into folders sitting at the top-level based on the technology. Pretty unsophisticated, ’tis true, but given that there’s only around 60 pages there, I think it’s just enough to know where things are while keeping things simple. I’m also hope to use the search more often, a feature Quartz comes with out of the box.

I may need to adjust the fonts a little more, and I am thinking of hooking up a hot-key to trigger the search box, but so far, I’m quite pleased by it. Granted it’s only been a couple of days, and I still have the backups of the old site if I want to back to this being a plain-old blog. But I think the Obsidian integration plus the more wiki-like architecture will suit this site better.

Oh, and one last thing: it’s been almost a year that that site has been up, and good news: I don’t hate the name. That was the issue I had with it’s spiritual predecessor, and it got to a point where I wasn’t motivated to write on it anymore. I don’t have any of these feelings with this name. Nor do I hate the idea of writing technical stuff there and everything else here. I know this is not a concern for anyone else, but for a few years I struggled with the idea of keeping two separate sites and where things should go. With having a place to keep my technical knowledge separate and in a format that’s easier to navigate, I think those feelings are at rest.