i don't need this particular service, but the writing style on your blog is really great and it makes me want to read through all your achives this evening.
i don't need this particular service, but the writing style on your blog is really great and it makes me want to read through all your achives this evening.
He should add writing to his skill set. Just my kind of style!
Can you link the blog? I couldn't find it.
https://blog.bityard.net/articles/2022/December/the-design-of-silicon-notes-with-cartoons
Looks like a good Roam research alternative! Agreed README file is pretty elaborate
I did a quick glance and didn't specifically see it. Does this support images too?
I'd also like to know this. I'm using bookstack right now for the exact same purpose (personal wiki documenting technical stuff from my projects) and I much prefer the look of OP's project. If it supports embedded images, I'd totally give it a try.
It doesn't support images, but I'm not opposed to adding them someday if I can figure out a clean way to do it, or if the right PR lands in my inbox unexpectedly. :)
Snapchat stores them as a data blob in an sqlite db
I read about doing this but decided it wasn't a good idea for some reason or another, maybe I'll look into it again.
It can make the file quite large fast if someone uses super large files, so I would limit the file size.
Qownnotes puts the pictures in a data sub folder and uses relative links for them to keep it portable
This is the way. Or base64 encode them as a massive string.
This is cool. How does it compare to Dokuwiki?
I actually used Dokuwiki for the better part of a decade, it's a great project. I wrote Silicon because mainly I wanted Markdown and a better text editing experience.
Hey, looks nice! interested in getting to know more as I plan to do something similar so please allow me some questions
It looks to me what you have done is something equivalent to using Sphinx + MyST, right? Why you didn't go down that path?
Also, maybe I'm missing something but, is your page available somewhere to be accessed? I can only see the github code
Thanks!
With Sphinx, my understanding is you point it at a directory of source material and then "build" it. Great for project documentation, and probably some people use it for keeping notes. A wiki, by contrast, just saves pages as they are edited, and recalls them when necessary. I suppose you could create something like Silicon by wrapping Sphinx in a web UI but I found the Mistune markdown renderer to be sufficient.
Silicon doesn't have its own page, just the Github repo and a one-page article on my blog (linked in the README).
Does it save in plaintext? I love dokuwiki for that.
It saves pages to an SQLite database, which is just one file, making it easy to move around and back up.
Plaintext files was one of the early goals of this (I love Dokuwiki too and used it for many years), but managing metadata on a filesystem turns into a PITA real quick. Plus, SQLite came with many niceties right out of the box, like full-text search. There's some more info on my blog: https://blog.bityard.net/articles/2022/December/the-design-of-silicon-notes-with-cartoons
Having started to use Paperless, their option to have documents be written to a specific directory might be an option?
An option to have the system output the articles after saving them to the DB into a folder structure might allow for people to easily migrate if they need to but also keep the niceties of a DB.
I've been trying to find a platform to experiment with Zettelkasten or the Second Brain method. This might be something I can use.
Ditto it seems I can unsub from Notion now after I use this one. Thanks OP
Hey there, I like what I see so far! Quick question though, ~~and I didn't see it mentioned anywhere in the comments below or on GitHub, but how/where is the actual content stored?~~ How can the SQLite db that you mention be backed up? Where is it stored? I brought the project up using docker compose, and don't see any mapped volume that I can navigate to.
It saves pages to an SQLite database, which is just one file, making it easy to move around and back up.
Overall, this project really has a lot of potential and I'm excited to see what comes next! Thank you for sharing this with the community!
Very cool! Just one question: How can I find the list of existing pages? Haven't been able to find it yet
Why not use Obsidian for this? It's not open-source, but it's completely local and also uses Markdown.
I tried and really liked it. Any plan for a pwa client? Ability to share to it from mobile web browser?
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What's your preference?
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Never heard of notenook, I assume it is similar to Onenote?
I'm using markdown for notes as well, and I'm wondering how people how people deal with:
1) Image carrousel to show a process step by step. Think gif but that allows to pause. E.g. showing a list being sorted step by step with pictures which would be inconvenient to show them all vertically.
2) More colors. I ended up using ,
3) Having two responsive divs right next to each other when the screen size allows it. I end up using a lot of vertical space and sometimes would like to use some horizontal.
4) word definitions that shows up when hovering the word.
5) add titles to code blocks
Any chance it's coming to Unraid?
You'd have to ask the unRaid folks, I'm not familiar with it, unFortunately.
Oh sorry, didn’t know the unraid devs had to do it. Thanks for clarifying
You can install it on unraid even without the community app.
Just follow the same instructions and do it from the command line. It won’t let you edit it In the ui, but you can see it running and view logs, etc.
You can also add it manually in the ui.
I believe you can add any Docker container to Unraid. Don't know details sorry, but watched a friend do it once.
Plaintext editing in Markdown, rendering in HTML
Not a huge fan of doing stuff in one place and seeing the effect of it in another.
I wonder why people love it so much.
What are you proposing, writing a website with MS Word?
...doing stuff in one place and seeing the effect of it in another.
Doesn't that describe virtually all programming and markup these days?
It's good for programmatic things like websites, bad for personal notes.
I want to edit in place.
You may not be aware but markdown is actually always rendered into html. In fact you can embed html in markdown. It's what makes markdown so slick.
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Looks really cool! Quick question (sorry if you've covered this elsewhere!), but I was wondering what the differences between this and trilium notes would be? I've been using trilium for a while now, but it's not really optimal for sharing with others 😅
Looks great, I'm excited to try it! I really enjoyed reading the associated blog post. So much really resonated with me. I feel the same about dokuwiki, which is the closest I previously came to perfection but somehow feels a little janky despite being very stable and nearly 20 years old. I've only just moved between notes apps recently, but I'm so tempted to spin this up and have a go now! Anyway your writing style made me chuckle so I've subscribed to your rss feed! Bill for my attention will be in the post!
This is the culmination of trying to find the "perfect" self-hosted wiki software for my own notes. I have no plans to monetize it but I thought I would share it with the community that has helped me in the past.
Solid README file and blog post - I prefer static site generators, for example, but I can understand if "One [SQLite] data file is easier to 'handle' than a tree of files"
You might also be interested in adding Litestream for continuous SQLite backups
As someone with a project in the same area, best of luck with this project! Always good to have a variety of choices to suit different needs.
I noticed there's no license in the repo. Is usually best to choose and apply a license so users know their rights to use/distribute/modify the shared codebase.
Thanks for the reminder, adding a license somehow totally slipped my mind, even though I use tons of open source software every day.
Surprisingly easy to do, I've been there. I guess because for personal use licenses don't really matter. But once you've started to see things through the lens of a business, suddenly they matter a lot!
Looks really nice. Like you say there's loads of self hosted wiki type things and none of them are perfect. I think it comes from the fact that storing knowledge is something that everyone has a slightly different way of doing.
I've tested out quite a few of these and one thing that helps a lot - beside an awesome Readme which you have already - is a demo page that I can access, preferably without a password. Do you have any plans to add this?
My rationale exactly! I knew what I wanted and eventually got frustrated enough to write one for me. I'm a knows-enough-to-be-dangerous kind of programmer, which I guess is either a blessing or a curse depending on how you want to look at it. I could probably spend the rest of my life trying to write all the different kinds of tools I want to use on a daily basis, IF I was skilled enough to do so. It's probably good for my sanity and free time that I am not.
I briefly had a PlayWithDocker button in the README but it stopped working almost immediately afterward and the service didn't any debugging info on why it quit working.
Otherwise, I can't think of a good (read: easy) way to do that without it turning into something useful for spammers and other bad guys. Maybe I could cram it into a JupyterLite notebook or something to make it run locally in the browser.
That said, the docker image is super easy to deploy and play with, the instructions for that are in the README.
You could potentially do something like a docker container that restarts with fresh data once an hour or something so that any spam that gets added won't last for very long. And also block any outbound connections from the server it's running on, just in case.
It wouldn't be perfect, but maybe good enough for a quick demo?