I’d like SilverBullet to be the place where writing starts. Whenever I write something, be it small (a post on a social network) or bigger (a blog post or potentially a book), SB should be my go to place.
In a sense it already is, but the fact is that I’m writing this post in Discourse and not SilverBullet. Why? Because I think there’s still a tiny bit too much friction on getting content out of SB into the wider world.
I see two ways of to get stuff “out”:
One offs: I write something small. A message to somebody that requires a bit of thought. A tweet. A discourse post like this. I (conceptually) would copy it, and paste it wherever and archive/delete the note in my space.
Live publishing: I write a blog post in my space, and want to publish it from there straight to <>, e.g. my Ghost blog. In a few hours I may detect a typo, and I’d want to go back to my page in SB, fix it there. And instantly have the updated version be published without having to copy & paste it.
Some time ago I introduced the Sharing plug in SilverBullet: Plugs/Share but it was only really designed with the “live publishing” use case in mind. I’m now rethinking it to also cover the first case.
What I’m thinking is that when you’d hit Cmd-s (ctrl-s) this would kick off the “Share” command. If you don’t have a $share (or perhaps I’ll rename it to share) attribute defined in your frontmatter, it’ll ask you: where would you like this to go?
Off the shelf options could be:
Copy to clipboard as plain markdown (so removing all the SB specific stuff, expanding live queries and queries into their inlined results), ready to be copied into some random other markdown supporting system.
Copy to clipboard as rich text (allowing you to paste it e.g. into a google doc)
Then additional plugs (like the Ghost plug) could add options like “publish this as a blog post on blog ‘Zef+’”, ask you for a slug (or suggest one), set the $share (or share) attribute including the post ID, and then push it there. Subsequent runs of the Share command would update the post in place.
What do you all think? Is this useful, important to what you use SilverBullet for?
The first use case is the one I would dream about, as it is exactly what I do manually everyday at work.
If you can easily export markdown or rich text, that would be awesome (but as you meant, with all queries and templates inline executed).
Abusing this idea, it would be great to have different markdown render flavors
This is already what I use SilverBullet for , just with a lot of manual steps.
Recently I was writing a presentation to share an idea with my research group, then compiling it to PDF with pandoc, and then manually updating the file on OneDrive. Based on the coming feedback I repeated it a few times.
Even with the manual steps of getting the content locally with git I really like how this worked out, will probably repeat it next week. Temptation to automate it intensifies.
I often want to be able to grab a note I’ve been working on and send it to someone. Being able to copy in rich text would be great, but at least on iOS/mobile, I’d love the ability to have a “share” button that lets me send it as a PDF or some other neat rich text formatted file that people would tend to be able to open on mobile. A universal share shelf where, e.g. I could add a pandoc plug button to export a PDF that would just trigger the iOS share dialogue – that would be perfect.
For the case of writing a book, notetaking apps in markdown have never worked (from what I read from authors online).
Why?
Keeping order of chapters.
Markdown has no easy way to specify a sequence. Unless you use a ‘linked list’ approach of linking chap. 1 → chap 2. etc, but then moving things around is cumbersome (renumbering)?
Who happen to be used to word. And word, as terrible as it is for other things, nailed the comment workflow maybe 20 years ago.
No easy way to do diffs for non-tech people.
No easy way to deal with versioning (per chapter). Yes, you can do it with version control, but it’s painful, and outside the reach of non-tech people or tech people who don’t want to deal with git wonkyness while they are writing prose. There are other things, and some MD apps provide versioning per page, but very very basic, and no named versions.
All in all, the book writer experience in a MD notetaking app is pretty terrible. My 2c
Hey there!
I have just began to use SB; I was using trilium and wikijs, but they are a little too … complicated? hard to use? for my taste for taking technical notes and how-to’s.
Currently my main use case is taking notes on the things (solutions to problems) that I have discovered during my projects; things that either exist on the internet but have changed, or doesn’t even exist. For example, using OpenCV Android SDK with the latest versions and implementing it inside the CameraX. This has a lot of old solutions on the net, almost none of which works.
My SD instance is behind a username&password, but I also want to share some of the posts as a blog (read-only). For example, in trilium you can share notes similar to a website.
I have checked the Share plugin mentioned above but really could not understand how it works Worst comes to worst, I am planning to use ChatGPT for converting SB markdown to HTML and publish it on my personal website, but I am eager to hear about any other solutions.
, just with a lot of manual steps.
Worst comes to worst, I am planning to use ChatGPT for converting SB markdown to HTML and publish it on my personal website, but I am eager to hear about any other solutions.