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Dennis Seidel

I 🔨 things. Interested in plain text productivity (ObsidianMD) & engineering. If you want to talk about this mail me.

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how to create a public blog based on obsidian notes

This articles describes how you can publish parts of your obsidian vault to your personal blog as a digital garden. I advocate sharing knowledge - it helps others and you can build your own brand.1 I do all my work in Obsidian2. I write for all my areas of interest3 howto's and whatis articles in a folder 03_RESOURCES and I classify each article as public or private. Now I wanted to provide these articles for others (on the internet or inside my team at work) to read. I update a simple and very functional jekyll template so it can render obsidian notes including their links.

Setup

First fork the repo and then clone your fork

git clone https://github.com/{your-name}/simply-jekyll-obsidian.git

Prerequesits

  • Install ruby with rbenv: rbenv init && eval "$(rbenv init - zsh)"
  • Install bundler: gem install bundler jekyll
  • Install the required gems for the blog bundle install

Optional: Update the dependencies with bundle update4

Configuration

  • Customize the _config.yml describe here.

Post / Note Integration

Next you move the notes you want to publish to the _notes folder. As I mentioned in the introduction I located my articles in the 03_RESOURCES folder and added a custome tag in the frontmatter classification: public to all post I want to publish. Given you run a simlar setup you can use my script to identify and move all the articles + the related images & files into the _notes folder.

  • Install the obsidian metadata-extractor plugin. Configure the plugin to create the metadata.json and the allExceptMd.json. files and note the path of the generated files.
  • First setup python & pipenv5.
  • Then initalize the runtime environment with pipenv install
  • Then execute the script located in the repository: ./copy_notes.py --vault {absolut-path-to-vault} --branch {the-git-branch-you-want-to-push-to} --metadata {absolut-path-to-metadatafiles}.

Run locally

rbenv init
eval "$(rbenv init - zsh)"
bundle exec jekyll serve

Publication

To publish youe website you push the update files to github. Then you configure netlify to deploy the new version. Optionally: Configure your own domain (DNS).

  • Use the script with the additional -p parameter to push the files to github: 
    cd _operations && ./copy_notes.py --vault {absolut-path-to-vault} --branch {the-git-branch-you-want-to-push-to} --metadata {absolut-path-to-metadatafiles} -p
  • This repository is configured with netlify to automatically build the dev branch. I can preview changes there. Afterwards I can merge the changes to master where another netlify pipeline build and publishes them to my website.

Footnotes & Resources

  1. In the social media age your own brand is important and more by sharing you can help others without any negative impact. Let's help each other by sharing :) ↩

  2. See the details of my setup in setup your work environmentsetup your work environment
    This article describes how you setup your work / writing environment to be productive.1 It use Obsidian to organize what I you do and write. The high-level structure are PARA folders.2 You'll crea...    . ↩

  3. At the time of writing the areas where: simple productivity, engineering, startup, healthcare / bio tech, iot and building teams. ↩

  4. With the last update I had to add webrick: bundle add webrick and bundle install webrick. If you use my fork this is allready done. ↩

  5. See how setup a python development environment. ↩