Obsidian
- YAML frontmatter
- Markdown headings
- Github flavored footnotes
- General markdown content,
- Spacing
- Pasting content within the app.
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Quick note on that processing I have spent a lot of time fixing the weblog.lol processing script in GitHub to do a lot of things and in hindsight I should have just had it take care of some of these issues like the tags and the return after the YAML line. However, for now I am going to just stick with using Linter as it does what it needs to and helped clean up my mess of posts. Maybe ones Neato is published I will reconsider as I might need to figure out how that all works. ↩︎
- omg.lol - For $20 a year you get access to all the great omg.lolapps which are worth much more than that in my option. From a blog perspective you can use Adam’s weblog.lol that is part of the $20 per year. However, you you might want to hold off till Adam is done creating Neato as it sounds well… Neato!
- micro.blog - There is a lot of apps you can get from Micro.blog depending on your subscription level. However, right now Manton has a new offering micro.one that is $1 per month blog which is an awesome price and way to get people blogging.
- create a “permalink” property based off of the url: one but remove the .html at the end
- for the “url” property append ericmwalk.blog before it so it would actually link to my blog (this is needed to have Micro.Publish update the right file)
- Replace the Categories property with Tag
- Add a “title” property for anything that doesn’t have a title and leave it blank
- Add a Publish property with the default setting of “false” as this is something that tells Obsidian Publish (if you are thinking of using that ever) if you want it published or not.
- Remove all other properties that are not needed for the file to be able to be published again (e.g., images, photos, lastmod, guid, post_id)
- Now maybe some of those things could come in handy at some point in the future but my reason for removing them is if I use Obsidian as my soruce of truth now these things do not get published or matter if I change them if I am updating the file.
- Reorder the Properties to just make it more pleastnt to my eyes in the following order: Title, Publish, Date, Tags, Permalink, and URL
- Steps 1-5 Micro.blog File Edit for Obsidian - Update Properties
- Step 6: Micro.blog File Edit for Obsidian - Remove Unused Properties
- Step 7: Micro.blog File Edit - Reorder Properties for Personal Preference
- I actually really like having this right inside where I have been taking notes and other things that I can quickly publish something from that images and all with no fuss, the note just shows up online.
- You are able to point your own domain or subdomain to Obsidian Publish. I did it the easy way by using Cloudflare since that was their example as I couldn’t quickly tell the easiest path with my own provider but I am sure there is a way. Seems to work fine with the Free version of Cloudflare so no issues.
- Customize the look and feel, I just left it as default right away and they have a couple simple things you can change right in the Obsidian Publish screen. There is more advanced ways to do it as well modifying CSS and after I gave it a go I did start searching GITHub and found a handful of sites that published their CSS as a good example to follow and use. Ultimatly, after all of my work creating my own publish.css I then found Minimal.Guide had a good simple example of a Dracula theme (and others) I wish I would have found earlier.
- Lack of RSS support, yes there is an RSS link for this site but there is not really any of the information you would want like date another things. It is really just a breakdown of note titles from what I can tell.
- You have to keep it in the root of your Obsidian Vault, or if you don’t you will leave you website pointing to /folder/notes. This would not be a huge deal if I used this whole Vault for just my Obsidian Publish site but the benefits I would enjoy keeping is being able to just have all things in one spot and then one Folder that was really a mirror of my site which I can move things in and out of. There is some chatter about in in the Forum so maybe this will change someday but I get why it probably is the way it is right now.
- Modify the CSS of the site is possible by use of the publish.css file you need to create in the root of your site, but you can’t edit it in Obsidian. So you it is burried in your vault system folder and you have to modify it there but then still go though the publish commands in obsidian to get it updated. Slightly clunky when you are testing things out but after you get it set I understand how then it is just in the background.
Obsidian Plugin - Linter
In my quest of updating old blog posts that I have dumped all into Obsidian I found a great plugin called Linter. What it says it does is as follows:
The Linter is an Obsidian.md plugin that is designed to help keep your notes in a more uniform pattern. It is designed to allow the user to specify which rules and settings to use so that they can try to make their notes as uniform as possible. This includes, but is not limited to, rules that affect:
For me however, I have really only used it to help for a small use case. It has helped to keep some more structure around the YAML items, specifically tags as my tags were a mess as I have gone though this process. I am not sure how some had quotes around it others didn’t, some had spaces in the Tag names and others didn’t as well. However, the really nice thing it would do in the tags rehlm would be to take it from a multiple line tags that started with dashes to a single line with commas. I probably don’t use as many tags theses days for posts so it isn’t as big of a deal when just a single tag. However, some of my older ones had multiple and caused a lot of issues when updating older posts.
Finally, I found a good use of the setting in Linter to add a blank line after YAML. This as small of a thing as it is, made it that much simpler as I have also been pushing all of my posts to weblog.lol and early on in the process I found if I didn’t have that blank line it would cut off the first part of my post when GitHub processed the file1.
Sorry for any noise in my RSS feed as of lately. I have been pulling in posts from Weblog and Obsidian Publish to my Micro.blog site as a way to make everything in one place again. I want to say I am done with having random posts in random places but this is something I can not guarantee myself.
Obsidian Publish Update
Let’s just say it was a good run and test. I published a handful of posts about things I was finding out about it and honestly it is very slick if you are using Obsidian to quickly posts something online and it just works. I think one of the bigger downsides to me if someone wanted to use it as an actual blogging platform is that the RSS is really not great at all. I am sure there could be ways to get that to work better or you could spend the time curating something to work better there but that seems like more friction than I would want to do. Even though I didn’t mention it earlier it is $8 per month if you pay for a year and that is kind of hefty in comparison to other blogging platforms you can find out there that are built more for well blogging. If you are looking for one I would check out one of the following
In the end, between the RSS and honestly having too many blogging platforms that I pay for already (both above for starters) and don’t always use I realized I didn’t really need another place to just publish posts as I have worked so hard over the years trying to combine things in one place. So that is probably the biggest reason for ending the experiment.
However, with that said I did jump back into weblog.lol again as I wanted to see if I could get Obsidian synced up to make it easy to post there as I do with Micro.blog today. Once I get the setup I feel good about I will share that setup next, however, I get it might be all for nothing once everything gets switched to Neato but that is OK, it helped me focus on something else this past week.
Using Obsidian for Micro.blog
I was doing my yearly backup of my Micro.blog site as well as other things I have online just to pull them down and store them on my local storage. As I was curious about what was in the zip file, I was reminded that all of the posts are in Markdown, and then I got this crazy idea: why not just load all these Micro.blog Markdown files into my Obsidian vault? Mostly because for almost the last 10 months, I have been using Obsidian for the start of all my posts and then publishing them using Micro.Publish. So I decided to do exactly that, and now I have a full backup in Obsidian, which is really nice.
Honestly, it was too easy to just get everything in here, and in the Properties part of the file, it had everything I really would need in order to make changes locally and use Micro.Publish to update old posts as part of my blog gardening from time to time. Well, it was all there, but some of the information needed to be modified. Seeing how I didn’t want to go to each file and update things, I turned to my friend AI to assist in this process and create a Python script to do all the work for me. This is where AI really shines, as I figured out what I needed the end results to look like and then just asked with an example of what it is now and what it needs to look like. More specifically, the changes I wanted to make in each file were as follows:
The good thing is AI was able to do all of this heavy lifting for me and fix the files as described above. I appreciate how it took a tedious task that I could have done to each file and just based on my trial and error of getting the right output (~20 min), I was able to get something that went through all the files and the properties section is how I want it.
The only downside of my overall approach is that I did it in 3 steps mostly because I didn’t want to start back over, and I realized after a couple of things changed, I wanted more as well as cleaning up some of the properties section. The end results were these three files below if anyone else wants to give it a go, but I would probably test small if you are actually going to use them.
Maybe if I have time at some point I will put it all in one file but the first one is really the most important in my opinion. I am also wondering if about making folders only by month instead of month and day as I typically don’t post more than 1x per day anyways. So I might need another script to help with this lifting next.
More Obsidian Publish Automation
Once I had created the template so I could get a better way to have things display on my Obsidian Publish site I next zeroed in on how to quickly create a note in the right place using the format I created. Because a I do make a lot of quick posts in my real blogging/journaling setup so it would be nice to put it in the right place in the right format that can just be tweaked sligtly to allow for multiple entries. That is where a previously installed plugin called Periodic Notes helped solve this. I gave this plugin a try earlier when using it for weekly notes but I never really used it so I just sat. However, I realized that how I configured that I could use their Daily Notes portion to modify it as you see below to have a new file created in the right place and then using the template I created it would have the right structure to show up on my site correctly.
This really does seem to give some promise to the overall using Obsidian to create online posts quickly if or at least if anything in a place they might want after a structure is created. I will say even if/once I abandon this little project with Obsidian Publish I might have to start using this Daily Notes plugin as all of my Running posts on Micro.blog have started in Obsidian since May of 2024. I have just found it easier for me to write there and then using Micro.Publish (also using Multimedia Uploaderto get the picture I take with it) get it to get it posted to my site with no distractions.
For more on that I wrote about my Writing with Obsidian for Micro.blog back in May as well.
Obsidian Thoughts 🤔
The more I have been using Obsidian as part of trying out Obsidian Publish, I actually think it could fit even more of just my everyday workflow and quite possibly replace how I use DayOne today. I primarily use DayOne as a notebook to capture a lot of different things, thoughts, notes, places, and things my kids have made or done. I guess as DayOnes purpose it is a digital journal that keeps both public things from my micro.blog site as well as personal things or things I just don’t share. One of my favorite things about DayOne that currently can not easilsy be replaced in Obsidian is the ability to capture location data when a note is created or it is updated when you add a photo. I have seen some articles and support pages having this as a request but I haven’t really found anything that will work that is just using a simple plugin. I think if Obsidian had a plugins that did this well or location data was built into the main program I would have to take an even closer look to just have Obsidian and cut out other note taking apps.
Obsidian Post Template
Go figure my first time ever making a Template in Obsidian is when I decided to go a little further in this Obsidian Publish and figured out a way to “automate” some features as well as help keep things organized. So this is what I have come up with so far.
---
permalink: {{date:YYYY}}/{{date:MM}}/{{date:DD}}/post-title
tags:
date: {{date:YYYY-MM-DD}}
publish: "false"
---
The permalink feature is really nice as this also helped solve a problem I had where I had to keep everything in the Vault root. Now as long as you are going to use Permalinks you can kind of put it anywhere.
Initial Thoughts on Obsidian Publish
Now that I pretty much have a working example of Obsidian Publish going and have changed around some of the settings and CSS even to make it look like it is right now here are my initial thoughts:
+ Plus
- Minus
Below are a couple of Sites using Obsidian Publish I stumbled upon as I was figuring things out and they also have their publish.css and publish.js on GitHub:
| Site | GitHub |
|---|---|
| Mister-Chad | Chad-Bennett |
| JordanTheITGuy | JordanTheITGuy |
| Joschuasgarden.com | Selfire1 |
| Wormwood Saga | Isaac-Tait |