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Writing & talks

From connected cards to an atomic content studio

A new authoring model for this site

The first version of this website’s content studio made the Jekyll files visible through a local interface. That was useful, but it also exposed a deeper problem: the folders and editing tools did not yet express the content model clearly enough.

The new direction begins with a simple distinction. Cards are atomic notes. Pages are structures.

Cards have one centre of gravity

An atomic card is not necessarily short. It holds one idea, experience, question, or reusable explanation that can stand alone and connect to other cards. Context and examples belong when they help that idea; a second independently useful idea may deserve its own card.

This gives the studio a practical editorial question: is this one card, several cards that should be split, or duplicate cards that should be merged? The studio can now flag possible split and merge opportunities as proposals. It does not silently rewrite them. Related but distinct ideas should stay separate and gain an explained connection.

Pages are allowed to compose

The homepage, category directory, card directory, and changelog do a different job. They arrange many things, sometimes without claiming that every item is semantically related. Pages can therefore use structural HTML, Liquid includes, and loops when a layout needs them.

Cards are Markdown-first. The local editor offers a simple writing view, Markdown source, and the rendered Jekyll preview. Existing cards with hand-built HTML remain editable in source mode until they are deliberately converted; the editor does not risk a lossy automatic rewrite.

Internal links can still use Jekyll’s template tags. A Markdown link such as [Connected notes]({% include card-url.html slug='connected-notes' %}) resolves through the card’s stable identity. The studio’s searchable card picker can insert that syntax without asking an author to remember it.

Search is part of authoring

The same search-and-filter behaviour now supports navigating content, finding a group, choosing a relationship target, and spotting a title that may already exist. Creating a group is explicit: if the search finds no active group, the author can choose to add it rather than accidentally creating one through a typo.

Suggestions should explain themselves

Link suggestions begin with an inspectable deterministic ranking. Title words receive more weight than descriptive prose, which receives more weight than the body. The proposal shows lexical similarity, shared-term coverage, common graph neighbours, group affinity, and the terms that actually matched.

That number is a rank, not a declaration of truth. It helps decide what to inspect next. The author still chooses whether the connection exists, which relationship type describes it, and what evidence-bearing reason belongs with it.

Codex or a local Hermes model through Ollama can review the deterministic shortlist and explain a suggestion. Every model call is manual: no model runs while opening, typing, saving, building, or watching files. Its output becomes a proposal to accept, revise, or dismiss.

The files remain the source of truth

The studio stores local preferences—feature flags and model choices—but not API keys. Codex uses its existing login, Ollama stays on localhost, and a diagnostics button checks each setup only when asked. The default Codex choice favours the least expensive suitable model and low reasoning effort for this narrow editorial task.

The important boundary has not changed: Markdown, YAML, Liquid, Jekyll, and Git remain the durable system. The studio is becoming a more legible way to work with that system, not a second database sitting in front of it.

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Immediate connections

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Connected cards

Follow links in either direction, or find cards that mention this one.

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