Moving away from reveal.js
What I wanted to achieve with reveal.js
The initial goal was to find a way to create presentations with a simple(optional) scripting language. I think in that regard reveal was able to hold up relativevly well, especially when it comes to the expandability, because you could just switch to plain html/css/js mid text and implement advanced webdev technologies.
Then, the scope evolved. The goal was to build a comprehensive note-taking system on top of revealjs, since I wanted to create good looking and easily written lecture notes. Reveal had the crazy feature that you could just host that shit as a webpage, which absolutely flashed me at the time so I naturally went with it, accepting drawbacks and compromises here and there. (Therefore disregarding that this presentation style might not even be the best format for uni notes)
Problems
Soon multiple problems came up:
- The presentation style wasn't really my desired format when it came to studying.
- The mix of markdown and HTML etc became unobtrusive quickly. Turns out that randomly throwing in bits and pieces of other languages here and there in an unstandardized way is not that good for keeping an overview.
- It split up my total notes even further, moving uni stuff away from everything else.
- Reveal itself seemed to be one of these projects, that had had their hype in the past but were just idling in the web now, not receiving much attention / support anymore. But that might have just been a wrong impression...
Anyways: I noticed that this type of note taking didn't scrach that itch for me.
Switching to obsidian.md
One thing I liked and wanted to keep from my reveal experiments was the simplicity of taking notes in markdown. Just worked for me. When No Boilerplate then uploaded his video featuring obsidian I decided to check it out myself.
Having heard about it in the past, I knew that it used markdown for its notes too, but was one of the most powerful and beloved note taking systems out there in contrast to revealjs. So, I set up a vault and got to work...
I currently have yet to document work / uni related stuff since we are on vacation atm., but I have been experimenting with moving ALL of my notes into an obsidian vault, having the power to link anything and I am loving it so far. Well maintained community plugins are providing seemingly endless opportunities to customize this system. And another important thing is the ability to sync / encrypt / selfhost the entire vault (including support for mobile devices).
And since there is even a cool plugin for turning your notes into presentations, I can happily archive my reveal.js files and look forward to an extensively documented future ^^