Publishing Pipeline
The wiki is a content management system. Ideas start as raw simplenote imports, get processed through dialogue into wiki pages, and the best ones should flow outward into the world. This page describes the pipeline for making that happen.
Publication Lifecycle (frontmatter)
Every wiki page can carry publication state in its YAML frontmatter:
draft: true # being worked on, not ready for eyes
public: true # ready to be seen, can be shared
publish_date: 2026-05-01 # scheduled for publication
published: true # live in the world
published_to: [substack, twitter, bluesky] # where it went
published_url: https://... # canonical linkA page moves through: draft → public → scheduled → published
Not every page needs to be published. Many are internal wiki infrastructure (index pages, meta pages, concept stubs). The ones tagged draft: true are the candidates — they’re ideas that want to become public.
What “publishing” means
Publishing isn’t just copying a wiki page to a blog. Different ideas want different forms:
- Essay → Substack, personal blog, Medium
- Thread → Twitter/X, Bluesky
- List → could be a standalone page, a tweet storm, a newsletter issue
- Interactive piece → custom web page (like the cultural black holes interactive essay idea)
- Talk/presentation → slides, video
- Collection/curation → a context dump published as a resource page
The wiki page is the source of truth. The published versions are renderings of it for different media.
Automation vision
At publish time, automations should make announcing and promoting easy:
- Format — render the wiki page into the appropriate medium (thread, essay, etc.)
- Publish — push to the target platform (Substack API, Twitter API, etc.)
- Announce — cross-post announcements to other channels
- Update — mark the wiki page as
published: truewith URLs - Track — how did it perform? what resonated?
This connects to the existing tweet pipeline at tools/tweet-pipeline/ in FractalOS.
The growing media project
This wiki is becoming a media project. The ideas compound, the connections deepen, and the published output grows over time. The dream:
- A personal blog/digital garden that mirrors the public parts of the wiki
- A newsletter pulling from recently published wiki pages
- Tweet threads generated from wiki pages (already have tweet pipeline infrastructure)
- A podcast drawing from the ideas (see Reflecting on My Principles)
- A YouTube channel
The wiki feeds all of these. One source of truth, many outputs.
Phase 1: Publish the wiki itself
Before any fancy multi-platform pipeline, the simplest and most powerful move: publish the public parts of the wiki as a browsable website with all its links intact. Like Andy Matuschak’s notes site (https://notes.andymatuschak.org/), where you can click through interconnected ideas and explore the graph.
Pages with public: true in frontmatter get published. Everything else stays private. The wiki’s wikilinks become real hyperlinks. The graph IS the product.
This is the starting point. Everything else (essays, threads, newsletters) comes later and builds on this foundation.
References:
- Andy Matuschak’s notes: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/
- Quartz (Obsidian → static site): https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/
- Digital garden conventions: https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
Next Steps
- Phase 1: Publish the wiki as a browsable website (Andy Matuschak style) — pages with
public: truego live, wikilinks become hyperlinks - Set up Quartz (https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/) — fully customizable, we can make it beautiful together
- Add public comments — options: Giscus (GitHub Discussions backed), Utterances, or Disqus. Giscus is probably the best fit (free, markdown, threaded, no tracking)
- Add analytics — recommended: GoatCounter (free forever, privacy-first, no cookie banner, Quartz supports it natively). Alternatives: Umami Cloud, PostHog, Microsoft Clarity.
- Define the frontmatter convention and update existing draft pages with
public: true - Build a dashboard view of publishable pages
- Phase 2: Create a
/publishskill for formatting wiki pages for other media (threads, essays) - Connect to existing tweet pipeline
- Design announce/promote automations