Xlog
Sunday 20 November 2022

sideproject

I wanted to write my notes in text format. my options were:

  • Web Service
    • Google doc
    • Notion
  • Application
    • One note
    • Obsidian
    • Typora
    • Emacs Org-Mode

My preferences

  • I wanted to have my notes on my machine. having all of my notes on remote server is a no go.
  • I wanted to be able to extend the solution
  • Nothing complicated, it should be simple with no extra features I don’t need
  • Plain text format, binary data or custom formats lock my files to a specific solution

Org-Mode

That eleminates everything but Emacs Org-Mode. And I tried it for a while. the main problem for me was that it’s limited by emacs UI. so I can’t include a video or audio and extending it require Knowing Elisp. I can do simple stuff in Elisp but the fact that Org-Mode is already complicated then extending it with a language I’m not very familiar with harder.

So that drops even Org-Mode.

Xlog

So I had to write my own solution. I choose go for that. build a very simple core:

  • HTTP server
  • works on current directory
  • has an interface that renders markdown to HTML
  • has an interface to edit markdown files

Then I started to add every feature as one file to the project and structured it in a way that removing the file removes the feature.

Then I started to add some features like:

  • supporting hashtags
  • converting any text to a link if it’s a name of another note.
  • list of recently edited files
  • search
  • support for emojis
  • versioning

Generating static files

  • After couple months of development I made a video on youtube describing the program and that increased my interest in developing it again
  • So I added a way to use the program in readonly mode
  • and then used that develop a way to build the whole directory as HTML + extension pages.
  • That allowed me to migrate my personal website (the one you’re reading now) to more simple and flat structure. I was using github page default jekyll structure before.

Main website

📼 index | Xlog

Xlog is a static site generator for digital gardening written in Go. It serves markdown files as HTML and allows editing files online. It focuses on enriching markdown files and surfacing implicit l

Github project

The program is open source on github:

Backlinks

See Also