Documenting Drambo - Modular Garden Flow
I made a post about my journey to creating a website dedicated to drambo documentation, and I'm not sure what else I can add to that here, but I wanted to share the site with the loopy pro community nonetheless.
Here is the document site, currently it's information within the app, and on the forums.
In time it will contain references for terms within electronic/modular music, acronyms, etc.
One thing I really want to see, is documenting user patches, even user made templates for projects. IE; a full track being made A-Z!
I spent many, many hours researching different solutions for what I wanted to make, creating the notes, adding photos of all the modules, linking everything, etc.
It's not perfect, I imagine more eyes on this will help point out some issues, I'm going to add this to github soon in case anyone wants to contribute. No worries either way, as I plan to have this up for myself anyways.
The site lives here
This post is also on Loopy Pro forum here
Comments
Wow! Really nice implementation. Would you mind sharing more about the technical aspects of creating the notes and then publishing them in this way? I have toyed with doing something similar - less of a objective documentation and more a personal take on Drambo patch building.
Of course! I would love to help you with that.
I suppose I don't know what you know and don't know about publishing notes online or what exactly you have looked into, so I pre-apologize for the overly verbose post.
With this approach I took for this site, I ended up using [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/), which I already used for my notes, I looked into several different ways to publish through Obsidian, so as to not break flow.
The first attempt was with a plugin within Obsidian, [Digital Garden](https://github.com/oleeskild/obsidian-digital-garden) , but the creator was MIA for a bit so the plugin was stuck in an endless loop that left it unuseable for several weeks, while that's not my typical experience with using Open Source plugins, it's one I've read about in other platforms that utilize that type of Open Source plugins, and just the Open Source community in general.
Which I totally get, as the plethora of pros/cons with Open Source, I don't want to make it seem like i'm against it or don't understand how much of the entire internet is typically ran on the back of open source, though for this project, it left me feeling, uneasy.
Then, I looked into [Quartz 4](https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/) which even won Plugin of the Year from Obsidian last year or year before. I think it's very well done, and maintained very well. I couldn't, for the life of me, get it to work. In my freelancing life I've built, and maintained, dozens of websites on a variety of platforms utilizing a lot of different frameworks, and this left me frustrated, so when I eventually got it work, I again, felt uneasy about relying on it for this project
Then, I went with my platform of choice, [Ghost](http://ghost.org/), the CMS for my site [unfocused](https://unfocused.xyz/) that I really love. Non-Profit, open source, and once I left my default for years, Wordpress, for my other clients, I gravitated towards this for many many reasons, though, it's a bit much to customize for your own themes and the like.
One thing that I didn't love about this approach, for a documentation site specifically, is that it didn't utilize 'Wikilinks' which is something I've come to rely on for a few years now, both Obsidian, and [iA](https://ia.net/) which I've used for over a decade, have this functionality and other than changing my workflow, or linting every file and hoping it didn't contain any errors, I didn't see a way around not having that for this project.
Then, I realized that I could try [Obsidian Publish](https://obsidian.md/publish) again, which I originally tried a couple years ago for a different project, but it's necessity to use Cloudflare if you use a custom domain presented roadblocks that I couldn't figure out or find answers to, so I tried again, and then this time it seemed that it was better documented / smoother to accomplish a custom domain with it and the lack of headaches, the relatively well priced hosting, a way to support Obsidian's development, and it's all tightly integrated within Obsidian, became easier to just accept this as the route of what to go with.
While Obsidian Publish has some quarks, all platforms do, I would say overall I've had a pleasant experience with it, while also kind of getting in my own way or having bad implementations that I later had to redo, IE; the screenshots of every module were, in a word, shit the first time around, then I realized the settings on my screenshot app were overly compressing the photos, and so was Obsidian Publish.
So I had to redo all of that, even after attempting some upscale apps. But with that, I had to compress all of those photos to make them functional but clean within Publish and it's limitations for photos. So while I don't have videos, currently, I imagine this platform isn't well suited for it if pictures are a bit of an issue.
Then after all that, having to come up with a framework of how to utilize the UI of drambo in a text based way, which I think I nailed, but for instance 'Tags' are used as a page index/section, like they are in Drambo, while using a unicode (♯) to distinguish the common lexicon for tags and to be able to name them for upload/mac syncing since Apple doesn't allow proper number tags (#) for file names.
So the major difference is that in Obsidian, #tags are utilized very differently, so I had to make some decisions on how to utilize the differences while not taking away something as ubiquitous as #tags, which in this setting I've relegated all the usage of tags to the [Modules Table](https://drambo.xyz/module-table) page so that the website can utilize it's functions, IE clicking on a #math brings up all the modules that have it, which I really dig.
Then having to research CSS for Publish being different then the CSS on the app for Obsidian, learning some Javascript, and figuring out SVG for the logo etc.
All in all, if I were creating content on my own patches and didn't have the documentation aspect of it to find a solution for or needed to utilize wikilinks, I would have gone with Ghost, no question.
I'm selling myself short on how long I focused on the Ghost solution, I spent weeks a couple months ago maybe longer on making a Drambo site there, including a lot of backend chicanery that put that project on hold, in the end, I have an idea i'm kicking around to still do that, for uploading patches/templates/projects that I plan on still doing, as I even had a theme designed with assets for a brand of sorts and another Drambo user who is going to author some of their own patches/projects I believe
God, I hope this wasn't painful to read, but if you have any questions, i'm 100% okay with answering if I didn't get your original question answered.
Cheers @bcrichards - I've read, learned, and watched many of your videos and it's been a major help in not only my drambo journey, but my musical creativity one as well.
IDK why the md links aren't working here, oh well lol
Thank you for so much for providing so much detail, @offbrands . I am an Obsidian user myself and have tried a few times to just get something working using Obsidian .md files and one or another plugin to export. I like the nonlinear and connected nature of willing and would probably try and retain that, if I ever get around to starting this project.
Try that Digital Garden Plugin, it's free, just follow the set up, and it may be good enough to wet the beak.
I believe they've updated the documents recently-ish so it might be worth giving it a shot.
If cost isn't an issue, Publish is great, truly. Education discount if you have access to an .edu addresses as well.
If you have any questions or just need help with set up, hit me up, don't mind helping.
Ha ha ha, also started something like that a couple of years ago (not public) and was searching for the right "cms". Also discovered Obsidian lately and was blown away by its flexibility. My inspiration at that time came from Tangible Waves and their wiki (e.g. http://wiki.aemodular.com/#/modules/2oscd). There is a clear structure for their module documentation:
Important for the technical stuff to me was Markdown and plain files so that you are independent of any product or vendor. Tangible Waves uses Publii which is nice, but is its own universe.
My project never came to "ready for the public" due to the well known "time monster" which eats up every single minute 🤣
So, I appreciate it very much that someone else pushed this idea of Drambo documentation further. It is a really great starting point! Thanks for the effort!
But…It would be HUGE enrichment for Drambo if this kind of documentation will we also used in the internal help… Maybe your work is the trigger 😉
The question is how collaboration can look like. I would like to support the project, but I have no experience in maintaining Obsidian vaults in git for instance.
Sorry for the late response! Thank you for the kind words.
Obsidian has a Git plugin, if you're not familiar with Git, it's kind of a like an on-rails kind of thing. If you're familiar with Git & don't mind using a terminal, that's how I was going to go about it, for Pulling/Pushing changes. Would set up an automatic nightly update.
Obsidian Publish has a collaboration feature where the main owner would give credentials to other users, this would be the way for updating until I get around to making this available on Github / make a through README.md file..
I have some goals I want to hit before I get there, including a sub-domain specifically for user made patches, so once I get there I think I'll launch the github then, though, I may just launch that before then and skip around on my to-do list. We'll see!
That wiki you shared is great. I don't love the single hierarchy approach but I like the accent color and the links to the main site on each page, I'll set up a linter to do that for Giku so each page links to Drambo / this Forum.
I also wanted to add a breadcrumbs feature at the top of every page, so I have a few more things I need to work on, plenty to do, never enough time ;)
@offbrands thank you. We really needed a solid user guide for Drambo and that is such a concise layout. You mentioned some workflow docs showing the patch from a-z, I’d really like a recipe section. Things like how to make a patch sound more analog (how to route the filter and shaper in ways to sound more like dagger/zeeon). How to do basic things like am/fm modulation. How to use math op to make new distortion types. How basic logic circuits work. How to make a patch do a one time trigger when it loads (ra2000 example below I needed for a patch I created)
I think new users could really benefit from a faq style cheat sheet for building specific modular systems. People have shared so many Drambo specific workarounds/hacks in the forums and it would be amazing to have them collected somewhere
This is super helpful! Thank you. If anyone else has any nuggets like this from this forum, or elsewhere, plz share!
I've been stuck on how to get this idea implemented, so thank you!
Also thank you for the kind words!!!
New Release on Drambo effectively puts the help documents into the app in a much smoother way than I could ever hope to make on a separate website.
Happy to see it, a much better solution than it was previously.
I'Il upload the documents I created to Github for anyone who might want to download some markdown text for their own documents if enough people are interested. They would be perfect for someone’s Obsidian vault for instance.
But there isn’t a point for me to pay for hosting now that a far better user experience exists in the app.