Allie's Homepage

Publishing Obsidian to Web

3 min read

Recently I’ve been thinking more and more about publishing some thoughts I’ve had; I just didn’t have the motivation, time, or trigger to do so. A conversation I had yesterday made me realize that writing is actually quite important.

Writing forces me to take a stance, to have a digital identity and a voice which is difficult but valuable. - WJ

Let’s see how it goes!

In researching the best path to publish, I decided I wanted these constraints:

  1. Don’t want to have to manage a separate vault, but if necessary, sure.
  2. If I have to manage a separate vault, I don’t want it to be deeply nested in a project structure. I’m here to write, not to code!
  3. I want it statically generated
  4. I want to keep the majority of my Obsidian unpublished, and only notes in published folder published.
  5. I don’t want to have to manually set posts to be published. It should publish all unless I add a property saying that it’s a draft.
  6. Mostly working out of the box. Again, I’m here to write, not to code!

The options

I’m not a huge fan of Ruby (so no Jekyll), and I wanted to isolate my posts in a folder rather than just tag specific notes to publish (so no Digital Garden plugin). I tried Astro Starlight but found it a bit too much like a “Documentation website,” and I didn’t really like the config method of pointing to a vault in a separate directory (I don’t want it running in the same repo as my vault).

Quartz seemed good! It just seemed like I had to use the repo generated by Quartz as a separate vault, which wasn’t ideal… until I came across Quartz Syncer plugin.

The Quartz Syncer plugin takes all the markdown files in a specified directory and includes it in new git commits to your personal Quartz settings repo.

Instructions

  1. Create quartz repo and update settings in that repo (like site title, base url etc)
  2. Install and add credentials to Quartz Syncer plugin within Obsidian
  3. In Quartz Syncer plugin, set dir to published and turn on default publish all
  4. Add repo to Cloudflare Pages and set custom domain
  5. Write some posts… or just add index page to your published folder
  6. In the Obsidian ribbon, click Quartz Syncer publication center and publish!

Here’s the frontmatter I included in my index, so I don’t have a random page called “index”:

---
title: Allie's Homepage
draft: false
tags:
description:
aliases:
---

Thoughts

This is my second post, and I’m still evaluating the whole workflow. But so far so good, and I am excited to write and publish more!

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