After a long long long time collecting notes on programming and searching for the perfect way to publish them, I’ve decided to stop wandering and significantly narrow down what I want to have ready for the first version of my online notes.

Requirements

Refer to Requirements for a Note Publishing System for a comprehensive list of features I would like a note publishing system to support.

Discovering Astro JS

I recently discovered Astro JS, a flexible, easy-to-use, and fast static site generator. It meets all the requirements I mentioned earlier. However, it took me some time to find this tool. You can read more about my journey and the other tools I tried before settling on Astro in My Journey to the Perfect Publishing Tool.

Minimum Viable Product

Since Astro meets all my needs and I’ve already spent too much time procrastinating on publishing my notes, I’m focusing on defining the minimum requirements for my project to consider it published.

Generate HTML for Markdown notes:
- Convert Markdown notes (formatted for Obsidian) into visible and navigable HTML.
- The content should render well with a basic style (minimally decent).
Responsive Configuration:
- Ensure the site looks good on both desktop and mobile devices.
Consistent URL Structure:
- URLs like cheesebites.com/<note> or giferviz.com/cheesebites/<note>.
- They should not change with future updates or adjustments to avoid broken links.
Content Collections Integration:
- Configure Astro to recognize my notes in content/notes/ and generate pages for each.
- Collect tags (optional, if easy) and wikilinks (required, link format used in Obsidian Markdown) with a custom plugin.

Days 1-2: Astro and Content Collections Setup

Using IosevkaTermSlab Nerd Font. We need to create a smaller version of the font to serve it over internet, 13MB are too much. We need to create a script that extracts just the needed chars. 📅 2025-04-05 ✅ 2025-04-05
Index page listing all notes and linking them with a tag. 📅 2025-04-05 ✅ 2025-04-05
Basic markdown conversion of all notes. We should be able to see the markdown code transformed into a basic HTML page without rendering. 📅 2025-04-05 ✅ 2025-04-05
Favicon with a cheese. 📅 2025-04-05 ✅ 2025-04-06
Wikilinks support. 📅 2025-04-06 ✅ 2025-04-06

Astro and content collection setup. 📅 2025-04-06 ✅ 2025-04-06

Decide domine. —> cheesebytes.com (guiferviz.com/cheesebytes would redirect to cheesebytes.com too). I will create an about page in cheesebytes that links to guiferviz.com if someone wants to know more. 📅 2025-04-11 ✅ 2025-04-11
Ensure that all notes load correctly with URLs like or cheesebytes.com/my-note or cheesebytes.com/cave/my-note-in-cave. No more levels are expected. 📅 2025-04-11 ✅ 2025-04-11
Functional sidebar with top level files and collapsible The Cheese Cave folder. 📅 2025-04-11 ✅ 2025-04-12
Sidebar visible from all pages. 📅 2025-04-11 ✅ 2025-04-12

Sidebar highlighting current page. 📅 2025-04-11 ✅ 2025-04-11

External links should have an icon indicating they are going to take you to a different page and they should be opened in a new tab. —> Plugin created to apply class to external links and using and SVG background in my CSS to show the icon. 📅 2025-04-12 ✅ 2025-04-12

Styling markdown generated code with tailwindcss. 📅 2025-04-12 ✅ 2025-04-12
No scrolling in sidebar, just in file tree. 📅 2025-04-12 ✅ 2025-04-13
Fix inline code: do not show backticks and add backgroud colour. 📅 2025-04-13 ✅ 2025-04-13
Add note title to tab and heading. 📅 2025-04-12 ✅ 2025-04-13

Adjust title size and headers. 📅 2025-04-13 ✅ 2025-04-13
Add comments with Giscus. See Commenting System in Static Pages. 📅 2025-04-13 ✅ 2025-04-13
Add logo in title. 📅 2025-04-13 ✅ 2025-04-13
Minimun style. 📅 2025-04-13 ✅ 2025-04-13

Publish with Github Pages and Github Action. 📅 2025-04-13 ✅ 2025-04-13

Day 5-6: Fixing Post-Publish Issues

Fix page highlight. 📅 2025-04-18 ✅ 2025-04-18
Resizable and responsive side bar. 📅 2025-04-18 ✅ 2025-04-18
Graph visualization. 📅 2025-04-18

With all the tasks above completed, we have our MVP ready! While it’s not perfect, it’s finally published Cheese Bytes is a reality now! 🤗

To-Do for Future Iterations

Here is a list of tasks to focus on in the next iterations of this project:

Publishing Obsidian Notes in Astro - Project Journal