ObsidianPublish
- 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.
- 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 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.
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 |