Breadcrumbs, but crunchier! A folder trail under each note's title, where folders link to their own index pages.
Repo: https://github.com/bodster7/garden-plugin-croutons
In Obsidian: Settings → Digital Garden → Plugins → Install from GitHub, and paste the repo URL. If you use Ole's Breadcrumbs plugin, turn it off first, or you'll get two trails. The README has the details.
See the trail at the top of this page: Home / Digital Garden Plugins. Click Digital Garden Plugins. That's a folder, and you've just landed on its index page.
The itch
I wanted mini sites. Nothing as formal as a subdomain, just a landing page for a project or a theme, with its notes gathered underneath. Like this section, in fact.
Ole's Breadcrumbs plugin got me most of the way. It shows a note's folders above its title, like Home / Projects / Meshcore. But only Home was ever a link, because in a Digital Garden, folders don't have pages.
Except they can. Give a note the right permalink and it lives at the folder's URL. My Meshcore README sits at /projects/meshcore/, so it is the Meshcore folder's page. The trail just didn't know.
The idea
If a page exists at a folder's URL, link the folder to it. Otherwise show the folder's name as plain text, like before.
That's all it does, and it doesn't care how the page got there. A README, an index.md, a "folder note" sitting beside the folder: if it lives at the folder's URL, it counts.
A happy side effect: hackable URLs. Chop the end off any address and you land on a real page, and the trail shows you which ones exist.
Bumps along the way
- Starting from scratch, on purpose. Breadcrumbs' repo has no licence file, which means its code isn't licensed for anyone else to reuse. So Croutons was written from scratch, inspired by the idea rather than copied from the code. It felt like the right way to build on someone else's work.
- Learning to keep quiet. An early version warned you about notes whose permalinks sat outside their folders. Then I tried it on a fresh, untouched garden, and the warning fired on perfectly ordinary pages like
/about/. A warning that goes off for everyone helps nobody, so it went. - The name. Breadcrumbs, but crunchier. I'm not sorry.
Where it's at
- v0.1.0. It runs on both my gardens: bodster.com and this one.
- Not in the community plugin gallery. It does the same job as Ole's Breadcrumbs, and he's the person who built the whole Digital Garden world, so I'm content for it to live here for now. You can still install it from the repo URL.
Croutons was my first ever plugin, and with Webmention Endpoint, the first open source I've put out into the world. Scary and exciting in equal measure. If you try it, I'd love to hear how it goes.