Time to build
I've been pleased with the site thus far. I have things I'd like to include, like a toggle for light/dark themes, some more CSS animations sprinkled throughout, etc.
I've been thinking about how to implement my digital garden, and I don't think trying to have it tied into this Eleventy site makes a ton of sense. At least for now.
So I've been looking around at what other folks have done, including this great repo from Maggie Appleton,1 and I returned to a framework I'd first heard of a couple years ago: VitePress.
The two things that appealed to me most about VitePress are:
1. It uses Markdown for content, which is great for its versatility and ease of use, but it also meshes well for my digital gardening plans
2. It's powered by Vue, which makes adding components and laying out templates way more familiar for me (I love Vue!)
Plus having Vite under the hood means it's super fast during development.
I've been writing the beginnings of the digital garden locally in Obsidian. My plan is to have those Markdown files live in a webserver. Upon an upload, it calls a serverless function that converts things like links to VitePress standards and publishes updates to the production site.
This feels doable, and it'll be nice to tackle a non-trivial use case that maybe someone else could benefit from. It's possible this is a solved problem; I've been avoiding looking around intentionally. If there's a streamlined integration I'll explore it after the fact.
I've got the boilerplate up at explore.indigogarden.xyz for the time-being. More to come soon.