Digital Garden – Tech Tidbit

I’ve long used quarto and github pages to post in my studio. It works great. For many years I have also tried to publish my wiki/digital garden but it always kind of sucked.

I had tried free programs like logseq and foam, and they were ok, but overloaded for my tastes. I like simple markdown files. Obsidian! Roam! I hear you, but no, I’m not going to be paying either to let me have control over data I generate.

Hence two intertwined issues persisted:

1. Separating my note taking from the wiki meant that the wiki rarely got updated even though the daily notes overflowed with interesting links and things.
2. The free Github pages needs repos to be public. This means that I could not realistically combine my daily logs and the wiki.

Impossible to solve…. Or was it?

What if there is a world beyond Github?

There is this company called Cloudflare. You may have heard of it. If not, you’ve certainly been affected by it. They are a critical piece infrastructure for the internet. They also happen to have some interesting offerings.

One of them is cloudflare pages. The service is very much like github pages they enable hosting of static sites using various git repos, including github. You can specify a branch to build the site from and they take care of the rest. They can even use private repos… yay!

This solves problem 2. If nothing else, I can take markdown notes and have the conveniences of git and just lock it all behind a password thing that cloudflare also provides.

I almost set this up… but the settings page on cloudflare gave me an idea.

They allow subdomains to also be password protected. This turned out to be just the thing I needed. Now my wiki has a public section and a one-time-password protected private section for my daily notes.

I’ve logged my approach here: Deploying Cloudflare pages and setting passwords