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2717 posts latest post 2026-11-11
Publishing rhythm
Oct 2026 | 30 posts

A slug is the part of the url that comes after the domain. Commonly matches the file name of a markdown file many blogging systems. These are typically human readable, unique identifiers for pages within the site.

Wikilinks are a core concept within obsidian to link to documents by Slug wrapped in double square brackets. These are commonly used within wiki site generators.

[[slug]]

Obsidian gives you a keybinding alt+enter to go to that file, but if it does not exist it will create the file for you in the root of the project. It’s a nice way to quickly make new documents.

blogging in 2024

Over the past years couple of years blog traffic has been tanking, for some time I thought it might have just been me, but then i heard it from Dave Rupert on Shop Talk show, and it made sense. LLMs and AI is slowly killing the internet as we know it. My metrics I dug into my emails from the google search console team and found two results nearly one year apart. Impressions are only 60% of its value a year ago while clicks are only 35% of where they were a year ago. I’m getting less impressions and even less clicks. Suspicions What I think is happening is a large portion of users are getting their answers from ChatGPT, Copilot, and llms like this. A lot of my posts have been filling gaps in the internet, notes for myself when I struggle to integrate x in y because there was a gap of how to do so in the docs and stack overflow. Some small fraction of users have moved on to duck duck go and other non global warming search engines with AI in their results. Clicks are down even further, th…
Hotkey to open link under at the text cursor position while typing in edit mode I find myself not wanting to leave the keyboard for navigation and think a keyboard-only shortcut that could open a link at the text cursor position is at would be really handy for this case. Obsidian Forum · forum.obsidian.md Obsidian has a go to definition like feature, the keybind is alt+enter, I would have never guessed this one.

It was not obvious to me, but if you have a wikilink such as Trying Obsidian, you can jump to the file in obsidian, just like you can with lsp go to definition, the keybinding is alt + enter.

Very inspiring video Jason, these people faced adversity and crushed it. The market is so hard right now, its not easy to get a job, move around, and recover from a layoff. Everyone in this video just showed that you can make it in this industry right now, you just have to be willing to work harder than the rest. The bar is raising, a lot of great people are already putting in hard work to make it. Community is Key, Theo mentioned that a lot of the companies he works with don’t even post openings, they go to their community first and are often filling spots through lower risk community hires.
Thor always comes in hard with fire takes in his shorts. Especially if you are early in our career take this in. If you dont yet have kids, but plan to, double take this in.

I’ve long used copier to create all of my posts for my blog, and it works really well for my workflow. I think of a title, call a template, and give it a title. out of the box obsidian did not seem to work this way. It seems like it wants me to right click a file tree and make a new file using the tree, this is not my jam.

Here is what I came up with to replace my til template.

---
date: <% tp.file.creation_date() %>
templateKey: til
title: <%*
  const originalFileName = await tp.system.prompt("Enter file name");
  const toTitleCase = str => str.replace(
    /\w\S*/g,
    txt => txt.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + txt.substr(1).toLowerCase()
  );
  const title = toTitleCase(originalFileName);
  tR += title + '\n'; // Add the title to the template result
-%>
published: true
tags:
  -
---
<%*
const fileName = originalFileName.toLowerCase().replace(/\s+/g, '-');
const newFilePath = `pages/til/${fileName}`;
await tp.file.move(newFilePath);
-%>

<% tp.file.cursor() %>
  • tR is a return value, and it gets placed directly into the place it is in the file
  • to.file.cursor() creates a tab-index point so I can tab into the content

Trying Obsidian

I am giving obsidian a try, this is a test post to learn the flow. Something that has been really hard for me for a long time is images, I don’t include a lot of images just because it takes so much longer just to get the post out. I store them in a separate repo, I need to resize and compress them for the web so they aren’t so big. Images are easy This is my current wallpaper. I have more about my process in this post about Obsidian Image Converter. It’s still just markdown I don’t know why it took me so long to understand this but obsidian is just markdown files. I pretty much just plugged in my existing blog and it picked up all the tags and was ready to run. I now get some nice visualizations to help me identify posts that were not ever tagged or maybe left unfinished. It leans hard on wikilinks I just finished moving my backend over to md-it-python, which comes with some good wiliklink support. I even make a sick wikilink hover feature that previews wikilinks on hover. Inside of o…
16 min read

I’m giving obsidian a go as an editor for my blog and one of the main things I want to fix in my workflow is the ability to quickly drop in images. on first look through the community plugins I found Image Converter. I set it up to convert to webp and drop them in a git submodule. I may make it something other than a git repo in the future, but I’ve learned that adding images to my blog repo quickly makes it heavy and hard to clone on other machines.

obsidian-image-converter-20240731211310793.webp

Once the images are there they are pushed and deployed as their own site to cloudflare pages. I made a quick edit to my sick wikilink hover plugin for my blog. if it sees a wikilink ending in webp, convert the domain over to obsidian-assets.waylonwalker.com, and clean up the remaining "! " that the python md-it library leaves behind.

Note

after first try I needed to increase the width from 600 to 1400, the image in this post was unreadable.

This is part of me getting set up and Trying Obsidian

Damn Johnny is always such a positive vibe, just getting steamrolled by this braille shit. WTF are these brand sleeping on. Happy to hear that Andy and Brian are supporting him well. Also kinds shows what shoes are good when he goes to buy shoes cause no one will send him any and he goes with Etnies. Johnny keep it going!
Niklas Luhmann created the Zettelkasten method of notetaking, He was the Da Vinci of writing, holding a high standard that we can take inspiration from even today in this digital era. As many times as I have seem the Zettelkasten covered, I never knew that it roughly translated to little cards in a box. Four Principles Mischa lays out four principles of Zettelkasten. Atomic - each card conains one idea Link - cards are linked together Structure - comes from the links Own Words - You write the note in your own words My blog, tils, and thoughts make up my own zettelkasten. I am not going to say that mine is a perfect representation of his method, but the components are here. rather than building books, my thoughts and tils build up to blog posts. The rate of blog posts I write definitely changes with the seasons of life, as seasons change it becomes a bigger or smaller part of the season. I really like Mischa’s most important note to Write in your own words, this is what really promotes learning, and proves to yourself that you can form a thought around the topic. Up until recently I’ve wrote everything, but lately I’ve taken to copy pasting some quotes into my thoughts posts, but I…
add quick-tap-ms and require-prior-idle-ms · WaylonWalker/zmk-config-42block@cb2cda4 Contribute to WaylonWalker/zmk-config-42block development by creating an account on GitHub. GitHub · github.com Even after switching to my hm and ht behaviors I am running into some issues where sometimes I am still accidentally hitting mods(&hm) and layers(&ht) while typing and it’s been getting frustrating. My main issue has been on &ht, they are configured the same so I suspect that my pinkies just move a bit slower over the keys than my pointer/middle finger. I just added and to my &hm and &ht behaviors, and a few intentionally sloppy passes through monkeytype seem to show that its working well. A few days of trying this will tell whether it was a good fix or if I have maybe gone too far the other way. The end goal here is to be able to roll over keys faster without worrying about hitting other layers or mods.

I’ve had a couple of uploads to twitter fail recently and has been a pain. I tried some online converters for convenience, but none of them worked. I reached out to chatgpt and found succeess with this ffmpeg command.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 \
  -vf "scale=trunc(oh*a/2)*2:min(720\,trunc(ih*a/2)*2)" \
  -c:v libx264 -profile:v high -level:v 4.1 \
  -b:v 3500k -maxrate 3500k -bufsize 7000k \
  -pix_fmt yuv420p \
  -c:a aac -b:a 128k -ar 44100 \
  -movflags +faststart \
  output.mp4
Tickle My Keys Keyboards so good your fingers will be begging to tickle these keys. ticklemykeys.com I’ve been working on something, I’m gong to combine my mechanical engineering skills with my love of great keyboards and start a custom keyboard shop for building custom keyboards for exactly what people need with an emphasis on portability.