This website and all of my Big Picture stuff like presentations, journals, etc are all based around one app called Obsidian.
Obsidian is a Markdown note-taking app similar to Notion. The difference with Obsidian is that your files are stored on-device in the form of Markdown files.
What are markdown files?
(directly from wikipedia)
Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber created Markdown in 2004 as an easy-to-read markup language. Markdown is widely used for blogging and instant messaging, and also used elsewhere in online forums, collaborative software, documentation pages, and readme files.
WIth Markdown, you mark stuff as bold or italic, not by pressing a button in an editor like Microsoft Word, but by typing special characters around the text you type.
Here’s an example of a Markdown file:
**Markdown** is a *really cool* language.
You can format stuff ***super easily***, including inserting [links](https://example.com) and images:
Here’s that same file being displayed:
Markdown is a really cool language. You can format stuff super easily, including inserting links and images:
This entire website’s content is also written with Markdown. Everything you see on this website has source code that looks similar to the excerpt provided above.
I chose to use Obsidian as I had seen good things about it online before, and I liked the concept of using Markdown files for note-taking, as opposed to Google Docs or similar.
One key feature of Obsidian is the ability to add various extensions. I use a few extensions to add extra features to the editor, but one in particular I use is Marp.
Marp is a framework for building slides using Markdown, and it’s the software I’ve used to create all my presentations for Big Picture.
With Markdown and Marp you’re also able to use HTML and CSS directly in the file, so I’ve been able to make a custom template for my presentations that uses four colours to decorate the whole presentation, including background gradients, title gradients, etc.
The software I use to make this website is called Quartz, which is a piece of software that takes Markdown files and uses them to generate websites. I’ve added my own custom modifications to Quartz to make it easier to use on mobile devices as well.
There are other similar website solutions, one even being made by Obsidian, called Obsidian Publish.
Obsidian Publish and Quartz are very similar in terms of features, however Publish costs $8 a month, while Quartz gives you more control over how your site looks, as you can edit the source code.