Waterline

I also began migrating papers that were previously standalone Rheo projects into waterline. I want to do this so that I can do all of my writing within the context of my main rookery, even if that writing is intended for a downstream context such as a sub-rookery (like my blog site or these weeknotes) or a paper submission.

It also means the #cfp declarations that I use to track submissions to conferences, jobs, and journals can reference the writing I submitted at each stage directly, since all of that writing is structured as an idea or a set of ideas. In this way, ideas as abstract units are a step towards an ideal writing system, as they improve the portability of bits of writing between different contexts (blog posts, published papers, meeting notes, and so on).

Any idea or folder of ideas can be excised as its own sub-rookery using an additional rheo.toml file. As such, both this weeknotes site and my main blog site are now sub-rookeries that are versioned in waterline, which is my writing mono-repo. I’ve set up a separate CD process for each subdomain I want, each with its own Rheo command. To build my weeknotes rather than all of waterline, for example, I run:

rheo compile waterline \
  --config "weeknotes/site.toml" \
  --build-dir "weeknotes/build" \
  --html

I’m pretty happy with this setup, and I’ve started migrating the rest of my active writing projects—a few papers in flight, and the small matter of my dissertation—into waterline in the same manner.