markdown conversion done, simply

Simply

#digital garden# #projects/simply
Simply is a website generator that reads markdown files and converts them to html, blending in a template that controls the presentation and layout, as well as any additional functionality you might want to layer in. Details on the project can be found here: naomi-nori / Simply · GitLab. It isn't feature complete, and those features that will be added may be blended into a template as much as the base build component as my focus is on acheiving something specific with Bear output rather then a resuable tool directly.

Why it exists

I’ve used the iOS app Bear for several years now, mostly for collecting references and work logs. Recently discovering the digital garden and indie web movements I wondered about using it to also manage website content. Exploring what Bear was able to do by default, with its html export, left me sorely disapointed, but markdown alone is a rather flexible content format, so why not just go from there?
There are plenty of other tools around that could manage something like this, Hugo, Ghost, and Quartz, that represent the same concept in static site generation. I've tried a few but found that I had to change more about the way I worked with-in Bear to get them to play the way I wanted with what I had witten. I simply wanted to write in bear, and have a website as a result.
The idea of rolling my own sat for a while. My day job is writing software and I'm passed the days of writing software after hours just for fun. Opting to snuggle the dog or cat and read a book with those few hours of downtime. However with the AI tooling becoming more sophisticated I thought maybe I could use the idea as a guinea pig. Finding a certain purity in the idea that my words would build a place to hold the self-same thing.
The resulting code is quite a departure from what I would end up with had I written it myself, but I did observe in this practice that I was able to keep the specifics in mind while exploring the larger scope of what I wanted to accomplish. It was flexible enough to shift scope twice and still end up with a system that I would be able work with manually if desired.

Future feature ideas

• Frontispiece
• In page table of contents if the page is long enough.
• Copyright support
• Licenses page could be included in the frontispiece