2022-06-27

Reflections

Trialling flowershow with ecosystem project

Existing NextJS webapp. How do we convert to use Flowershow?

It has a few custom pages and components.

Pages could maybe disappear by having everything as a component and using it in markdown (a bit painful for hacking but hey it works)

site        # want this to be pretty pure flowershow
  pages/
  components/

content/    # markdown content here
components/ # custom components

Generally, there are two approaches to creating a "flowershow" based site.

Option 1

npx create-next-app --example=path to template

then you go ahead and edit your template as you wish.

The problem: how do you upgrade? you have now got manual changes to your template.

(There is a secondary issue of how do i create the template in first place with just what i want)

Option 2

Install flowershow template app somewhere and you don't touch it.

Create your content and make flowershow aware of it

Benefits: easy to upgrade.

Problem: limited customization. e.g. how do you add your own components? (Is that important? Maybe rule is for flowershow you live with components there or make a node package and install it!)

e.g. with ecosystem: we have some custom visualization.

Musing on use-cases

Today i prefer to draft my ideas in markdown in my personal notebook. For example, today i was brainstorming about an incubator for intentional communities. Now, suppose i want to share with my collaborator. What do I do?

Options I consider:

Copy and paste into an email. 4/10
- 👍 old-fashioned ubiquitous text
- i use email less and less and so a break in worfklow to open etc
- markdown looks poor
- commenting is not great
Copy and paste into whatsapp: 2/10
- 👍 quick and dirty. likely to see it quickly and respond even if just ot acknowledge.
- 👎 ugh, way too long for whatsapp. no way to comment etc
Get an html version and copy and paste into google docs and share the google doc
- 👍 great commenting, easy to share in a controlled way. all features of gdocs e.g. notifications on comments.
- 👎 i've forked my writing location: if i continue in markdown i have to keep copy and pasteing (and breaking comments) If i work in gdocs i've effectively abandoned markdown and have to reintegrate.

What if i could have a single command to turn a markdown into a (private) shareable url with commenting turned on (hypothesis?)

Even better would be that the url updates as i edit this doc (or i can re-publish).

Even cooler would be that markdown was editable online (a la hackmd) and that i could sync any changes back down (assuming no conflicts).

Potential meta/features to add

https://tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog.vercel.app/blog/new-features-in-v1

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