Glass
This Site Runs on Ikonic
For years this site was a Next.js app that read my Obsidian vault and turned it into pages. That worked, and for a while I wrote about how. It is not how the site works any more; the whole journey is in From Obsidian to Ikonic. What you are reading now is published by Ikonic, and this note is about what that means.
What Ikonic is
Ikonic is an operating system for the things I actually do, spread across the devices I actually own. You talk to it. It listens, it answers from what it knows, and when it does not know it says so. Under the hood it is a set of small subsystems that each do one job and compose, the way Unix tools do. Publishing this site is one of those jobs.
I am building it because I want a machine that gets faster and more capable at my work over time, without handing my work to somebody else's cloud. There is no account here. There is no hosted store of what I read or what you read. When Ikonic devices need to share, they share over a mesh of machines I control.
What this site is, then
This site is a glass. That is the Ikonic word for a surface that only quotes. Every page here is a note in my vault that I marked as published, rendered exactly as I wrote it. Every answer the omni gives you at the top of the page is a passage from one of those notes, with its source. Nothing on this site is generated. If you ask it something I never wrote about, it will tell you it has no page for that, rather than make one up.
The omni is the main way in. Say "find science" or "show by time" or "what is this", or just type. The contents rail on the left is the same set of pages arranged by topic, and there is a graph in the corner that shows how the page you are on links to the others. If you would rather be walked through it, say "guide me through it".
What stays in your browser
A few things on this site remember, and I want to be plain about which.
- If you say "yes, remember", the pages you open, how far you get, and how long you stay are kept in this browser only, so that "where was I" works. Nothing is sent anywhere. Say "forget me" and it is gone.
- Your choice of Gloss or Plain reading, and whether the contents rail is open, are kept the same way.
Nothing is recorded until you opt in. There are no third-party scripts here.
Following, and what comes next
If you run Ikonic yourself, following this site will mean a connection between your Ikonic and mine over the mesh: my public notes, entities and instruments answering your questions with their provenance attached. That verb is not built yet. Until it is, there is an Atom feed for any reader, and the address is in the colophon at the bottom of every page. I intend to offer tools here for other Ikonic users as they are ready. That list is empty at the moment, which is honest.
The pipeline is still the one I like: write a note, mark it published, and it appears. Where the note gets written is what is moving. I started in Obsidian and I am writing there less; more of these notes now begin as something I said to Ikonic, and the publishing is one more thing the operating system I am building does for me. I am its first user. Expect this note to change as the system does.