Home > Reflections | ⏮️ ⏭️

2024-04-21

🏁 Hello, World!

I recently started blogging.

✍ Blogging From Obsidian

To get started quickly, I

1. installed the GitHub Publisher plugin for Obsidian
   • this allows me to easily publish notes from my Obsidian app to a GitHub repository
2. configured GitHub Pages for the new repository
   • this provides free web hosting
3. copied some default Quartz files and a corresponding GitHub Action into the new repository
   • which processes the markdown files
     • converting them to HTML
     • adding some fancy widgets to the website
     • and styling everything
     • to create and publish a website
     • every time I update the repository

🤖 The Joys of Automation

I love the streamlined workflow this provides for me.

1. Open Obsidian on any device
2. Write or edit content
3. Publish
4. In less than a minute, the changes are live on the web

🌓 Color Schemes

One of the really nice out-of-the-box features that comes with Quartz is a toggle for switching between light and dark modes on the website.

I’ve long been a fan of the Solarized color schemes.

Today, I decided to swap the default Quartz light & dark mode color schemes for Solarized variants.

🔍 Trivial Solution Not Found

After a few naive Google searches like “Solarized color scheme for Quartz”, I was unable to find anything ready to use.

🔧 Engineering

So I decided to take a stab at implementing this myself.
This isn’t a huge challenge, as the Solarized website documents the color scheme very nicely and there are many example implementations to reference.
Essentially, this boiled down to

1. editing my default quartz.config.ts file
2. copying the Solarized colors from the website
3. guessing at an appropriate mapping between Quartz’s theme color names and Solarized colors
4. running the local quartz server for hot reloading on changes
5. being disappointed in the resulting color scheme
6. repeating steps 3 and 4 until I found something that very closely approximates the theme I use in Obsidian

🪞 Reflecting

Due to its popularity, I’ve never had to implement a Solarized theme.
Digging into the details enough to define the color mapping reveals an elegant system.
I especially like how easy it is to invert the scheme from light to dark.
The code change produced by this adventure can be seen in this commit.
And hopefully you’re enjoying the resulting color themes on my website!

💬 Thinking About Comments

🌐 My new blog is a static website.
🔁 Feedback is valuable.
🗣️ Comments are popular.
📚 Let’s start with some research.
🔍 Searching the internet for “add comments to static website” yields many options to consider

• https://cactus.chat/
• https://commentbox.io/
• https://github.com/souramoo/commentoplusplus
• https://coralproject.net/
• https://cusdis.com/
• https://disqus.com/
• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/comments
• https://github.com/imsun/gitment
• https://isso-comments.de/
• https://remark42.com/
• https://schnack.cool/
• https://staticman.net/
• https://utteranc.es/
• https://webmention.io/
• https://welcomments.io/
• …

😅 Having many options can feel overwhelming.
🤔 Thoughtful constraints will help narrow our options.
🔮 Maybe we’ll borrow some ideas from Planning For Everything.
🔜™️ To be continued…