About Niall's Cave

This project started after I spent some time thinking about what I was going to do with my main webiste when I embarked on my travels. I didn't want to keep paying a monthly subscription to a hosting platform to serve my main website. I also didn't want to have the time burden of trying to maintain a visual, dynamic website. This lead to me looking at other ways of publishing content online that is lightweight, easy to update, simple, looks nice and most importantly, free.

At this time I was migrating my previous notes, including all my uni content, over to a new notes tool. I then realised it would be amazing if i could just publish the notes in my library as webpages, and have a simple index and navigation system. This is where DigitalGarden came in. I stumbled across this after googling for ages trying to find a solution. I have previously dabbled with Python and it's web capabilities with frameworks like Django and Flask but really didn't want to spend loads of time creating and maintaining templates. DigitalGarden was the solution.

What is a Digital Garden?

Well it's a simple concept whereby an individual publishes living notes online, and develops and grows them, hence the garden moniker. It is a safe place to share thoughts and ideas and nurture them in the public domain. The DigitalGarden plugin for the Obsidian app makes this possible.

I wasn't going to create a digital garden, I do that offline, but I was instead going to use the tool to build a simple and easy to use website - the one you're on now.

Obsidian is a elegant software that is a simple or as complex as you like. Creating this website is almost like having a word document per page. I create the content, hit publish an 30 seconds later its online. I can set URLs, titles, add tags and more. I can even do all this from my phone!

So I hope you like this simple website, if you have any questions about how I created it, let me know! I'd be happy to share!

Why Do I Call It My Cave?

I wanted a name that I could use to refer to niallbell.com without just using the domain name. I've always liked the idea that Plato proposed in his Theory of Forms. I should write a dedicated post about this theory but essentially it suggests that the world we see is just an imperfect representation of the perfect form. Only once you have mastered the art of reason can you access the World of Forms. Plato argues that there is another dimension where everything is in its perfect form. His allegory of the cave essentially uses a cave and a camp fire as an metaphors for this theory. The fire casts a shadow of things placed in front of it it onto the back wall of the cave. A group of people are restrained in the cave and can only see the back wall. Therefore they only ever see the shadows of the actual items. This is the metaphor for us only seeing the imperfect 'shadows' of the objects in the 'World of forms'.

This website provides an insight into how I see the world; I'm sat in the cave looking at the wall trying to figure out what the world is all about. This website is where I share my thoughts and feelings about the world.

Acknowledgements

I wanted to make acknowledge some people who have helped me achieve the creation of this website. I'm not a coder/programmer/web developer by any means and the support from these people/open source projects have made this possible.

Software/Plugins:

• Obsidian which is the Markdown editor I use.
• oleeskild/obsidian-digital-garden which is the plugin used to publish the notes.
• Vercel which I use to deploy the site (hobby tier).
• GitHub which is used to store the codebase.
• Imgur some of the photos shared on here are linked from Imgur.
• GPT - Copilot which I have leant on heavily for AI support in some of the CSS and HTML aspects of this site.
• Waline provides the comment system in use on the website. It's a modification of the Valine project and it's brilliant. Definitely check it out!

People:

• Utsob Roy who helped my personally implement some features of my website.
• Microsoft Copilot in Bing which has helped me massively with some of the javascript and CSS elements of the site. Genuinely a game changer!

It's thanks to the kind people who tirelessly work to create open source projects and plugins that make these kinds of things possible. And, those who support strangers on the internet for no reason other than form the goodness of their heart.

With that in mind, if you wish to discuss anything with me, if I can advise on photography, assist with nature questions or explain how i created this site, please get in touch: Email Me

Comments

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Created by Niall Bell (niall@niallbell.com)