Episode 1 — Getting the lay of the land

Welcome to the series. Over the next few episodes I'm going to walk you
through silan-viking — how to install it, how to write content with it, and
how to get that content onto a live site. By the end you'll be able to take a
half-formed thought and carry it all the way to a published page without ever
leaving plain text files.

But before any of that: thirty seconds on what this thing actually is,
because the mental model is what makes the rest easy.

What silan-viking is

silan-viking is a personal content system. Not a CMS, not a static-site
generator — a system that treats a 3am spark and a polished published essay as
the same kind of object, just at different points in its life.

Everything lives in one content tree on disk, as plain Markdown and TOML. A
Rust engine parses that tree, validates it against a single schema file, and
projects only the things you've explicitly marked public onto your live
site. Nothing leaks; nothing gets thrown away.

The two ideas worth holding onto

If you remember nothing else from this episode, remember these two.

One: there are six content types. idea, blog, project, episode,
update, and resume. This series itself is made of episode items. Each
type has its own fields, but they all behave the same way — Markdown body,
TOML frontmatter, governed by one schema.

Two: status and visibility are different things. status is where a
thing is in its life — a blog post is draft, then published. visibility
is who is allowed to see it — private, unlisted, or public. They never
touch each other. A post can be status: published and still
visibility: private. Only visibility: public puts something on the live
site. This separation is the safety rail of the whole system — it's why you
can write freely without fear of an accidental leak.

How content flows

Here's the whole pipeline, start to finish:

write markdown  →  silan sync  →  database  →  backend + frontend  →  live site
   (you)            (engine)      (portable)     (Go + React)        (public only)
​

You write files. The engine syncs them into a database. The backend and
frontend serve the public subset. That's it — four moving parts, and you only
ever touch the first one by hand.

What's coming

• Episode 2 — Installing the engine. Getting the silan CLI onto your
  machine and pointed at a content workspace.
• Episode 3 — Writing your first piece. The anatomy of a content item:
  directories, frontmatter, parts. We'll write a real blog post.
• Episode 4 — Sync and publish. Turning files into a live site, and the
  one deliberate gate that stands between a draft and the public.

Plain text in, live site out. Let's go install it.