Enough of this meta stuff. Let's get back to writing.

Originally, when I started this blog, i wanted to have a simple way to publish files. We did that!

![[Pasted image 20250102144118.png]]

There's a few rough edges, though. Perhaps as an engineer, or a designer, or simply because of the type of person I am, these things stand out, glaringly missing. Of course my blog should have these neat features, I think. Of course it should look the best, be the easiest to use, and so on.

Sometimes I'm aware that what I think are great features are not great features to anyone else. For example:

• Writing my blog posts in markdown, and then then having it build automatically. (80% of the way there)
• Pasting images in Obsidian (my preferred markdown writing thing) and having them automatically show up in the site
• Better yet, a full WYSIWYG embedded in the blog itself! At this point, I know I'm fully off the rails. Who builds a whole blog creation engine when they just need a regular blog?

Some small things which may be useful to someone:

• The ability to create collections just by having folders -- for example, if I want to organize books I read, songs I like
• The ability to flexibly use a database as a backing store (if I wanted to browse every restaurant in NYC, or my past runs for example). At this point, I wonder -- is this just an app?
• Can we highlight recently added posts? Keep track of likes and comments? Include live rooms? The possibilities open up from here, all the way to sending newsletters to your custom subscribers...

And then, of course, there's the design aspect of it. I'm inspired by fancy personal websites but at the same time, i want to keep it minimal. I want to keep it real, going back to simplicity so that the average person might know how it was constructed: piece by piece. And what better analogy than to make it look like a work in progress, a drafting board, even a notes editor. If my site looked like Obsidian, I'd be.. not entirely surprised.

At present