August: A Local-first Linked Writing System

I’m back with this project after not having built a website in the months of June or July. Though that’s not entirely true, I have designed and built websites, just not one of the official twelve websites. No matter, I have plans to make those sites up, but before that I need to get back into the groove of thing. So, I’m starting off with something that should get me working across a variety of tools: building another experimental system.

This one’s something I’ve wanted to build for a while; a truly linked writing system. Meaning every piece of writing has both forward and back-links. Each page is part of a larger network of pages. This is not a particularly new idea, but it’s something that I’ve always been curious to try designing and building myself; it seems like a really elegant system. Given it’s been implemented plenty of times over, I do want to change it up a bit and explore a bit of new territory when it comes to how the site is constructed. I’d like to make it local-first, meaning the primary representation of these pages—markdown—is stored on your machine and any editing happens locally, rather than online. The site itself is built from these pages and served in as minimal a way as possible as as a static site. So the ‘live’ version lives on your own machine, and the ‘preserved’ version is the static site that lives online.

As usual, the goal is to do this as simply as I can. It might help that I haven’t written much svelte code in the past couple months, so it’ll take a bit to get back up and going and hopefully I won’t be as likely to get overly fancy with things.