Data Collection

We’ve done exactly what we didn’t want to do! Own our own blog. There’s a certain freedom we couldn’t resist. Sometimes the best answer isn’t the one you want. It’s the one you need. We did some initial exploration and inevitably found we wanted something that fit us. The way we work. It’s scattered and nonsensical. At least now we can be the most disorganized organized.

So what have we done? Moved and shifted our entire lives. Some with forethought, some blindly accepting that this direction is best. We haven’t been disappointed yet. Believe us, we have at least some minor gripes. Meaningless opinions.

Firstly, we’ve been using montaigne.io for almost the last year. Without the convenience of going from note to publish, we might not have found this as enjoyable. While we currently feel at home somewhere else now, if you’re interested in blogging or writing, making publishing an easy experience can let you focus on the part that matters to you – writing, exploring ideas, trying something out.

This implies our blogging lives have been intertwined and coupled to our note taking. We’ve kept it that way. Our notes are the raw materials that fuel digital distribution. Dinosaurs died for us. We’re plumbing our Keystone XL; taking eminent domain of another’s mind. What have we picked, Obsidian. We’ve known about Obsidian for a while. By coincidence, we noticed a post by Steph Ango showing their workflow for publishing from Obsidian. Timing is everything. We’re sold. We’d also like to point out an element of destiny. Our company colors and office mates couldn’t align more. We also like the open format and keeping everything within markdown. Part of what we enjoyed about blogging from Apple Notes is the limitations. We had to get inventive and work within the bounds. Markdown is a fairly simple text format.

We picked our destination! Set for the dark and purple lands of infinite customization and simple existence. Two tensions. We disregard the former. Disabling most things like the graph view and canvas. We’re instead relying on tags and linking notes to traverse our thoughts.

The migration was fairly straightforward. We created a vault to test out, synced to iCloud, created another vault as our final home. Using the importer plugin we dumped everything. Shook our bags and saw the cruft. It wasn’t actually that bad. Our biggest complaint is managing artifacts, pdfs, images; you’re the librarian now. We’ve gone into our settings and set:

Default location for new attachments to in subfolder under current folder > assets.

This at least keeps things organized. If you want a pdf as part of your notes it’s up to you to manage the proper dewey and place it accordingly.

To keep this integration seamless, we’ve also switched to markdown links instead of [[Wikilinks]].

We installed the obsidian-git plugin. A few others deserve honorable mention, Excalidraw and the Web Clipper. At this point Excalidraw is meme and style. We care about the Web Clipper. Problems solved. We have a tab problem. At various points we’ve tried to manage this and found managing could take longer than our existence. Tells you a lot about how much information is out there. It’s up to you to set the drip.

From here, we’ve established base. Our minds home. Information overload. It’s full of hashes # and []() – discernible symbols for those who like to get down.

We’re hosting a static site using Jekyll. There’s a number of options here. Basically, if you can use markdown for your posts and generate them to html this will work all the same. We’ve also conveniently created a GitHub template so you can host your own blog.

On to connecting all of this. This will actually be our first post using this pipeline fully. We’ve made a few hand crafted posts to test. This is the first voyage.

So far, we have, a place to create content and a tool to generate html from our markdown files. For the uninitiated, you can serve up a website with a simple index.html file and a complicated web server. If you’re clever you can always:

twistd -no web --path .

We’ll be using a combination of Fly.io and GitHub Actions. Fly.io is what will actually serve up the blog. Github Actions merely facilitates that process. When we want to make a post, we’ll sit down, do nothing, come back another day. Make some notes. Take too long. Realize it’s an endeavor. Finally we’ll commit our newly minted post to our obsidian branch. Check it out. Maybe run a little:

bundle exec jekyll s

Make sure formatting and links are all legit. Links are the one minor nit. It’s either something with our own ignorance or something that will never be. Image links have to be edited to remove the repo name. We didn’t make this rule. We’re only the messenger. We’ve also tried to be as lazy as possible and convert images during the deployment. JPEGs are converted to WebP. Demo gods have frowned before as we’ve tried to download a 5MB photo over LTE. Be skillful in your sacrifices.

If at this point you still think you want jiggle electrons in the void. Tell people your ideas, show pictures of sidewalks, rant about snails living sodium free. Create a PR and now everyone will know.

For more technical instructions follow along here:

• https://github.com/graphicalmethods/obsidian-blog

Resources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain
• https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification
• https://obsidian.md
• obsidian-git
• https://obsidian.md/clipper
• https://fly.io
• https://fly.io/docs/languages-and-frameworks/static/
• https://fly.io/docs/launch/continuous-deployment-with-github-actions/
• Templates
  • These are a few Jekyll themes:
    • https://github.com/maximevaillancourt/digital-garden-jekyll-template
    • https://github.com/oleeskild/digitalgarden
• https://jekyllrb.com
• GitHub Actions