Obsidian for the Win
I’ve been getting more and more into using Obsidian lately, and it’s really simplified my note taking. Since I’m also using Jekyll for my web site, I figured I might be able to use Obsidian to simplify that too.
My blog writing setup is pretty sparse. I’m using Jekyll and Netlify to host out of a GitHub repository. I’ve gone through various iterations on how to upload posts. I had a fancy little frontend that Kev created for me for a while. That was fine. Then I manually created stuff at the command line. That was also fine. For the most part, the most annoying issue with any of this has been the frontmatter.
Frontmatter is always an issue for me. I always forget what things are supposed to be, so I end up copying a previous post and removing all the stuff in there and then updating it’s frontmatter to be what I want for the new post and then creating the new post. It works, but it sucks. I’ve created “blank” files that had the front matter in them in a general sense and then updated from that, but I always seemed to forget to copy it and I overwrote it a couple times with posts and it was just not working for me.
For a while now, I’ve just been directly entering the blog posts into GitHub. I literally just create a new file in the web interface and type everything out. This works, but again I always forget to copy the frontmatter from another post before I begin, so I end up opening another tab and blah blah blah. You know where this is going. Of course, none of this is really hard per se, but it’s annoying.
Enter Obsidian.
I’ve been using Obsidian for notes for a while now. Since I’ve gotten to the point that I type out my notes in markdown even in apps that don’t support markdown, Obsidian feels very natural for me. I mean, you can type out your stuff like you would in a normal word processor if you want. You don’t have to do it in markdown, but why would you want to do that? Since Obsidian and Jekyll both use markdown, I’d even started typing my blog posts out first in Obsidian and then just copy and pasting them into GitHub for publication. This works great, except for that stupid frontmatter.
Of course, and I think this is a well established fact at this point, I’m a moron. Templates exist in Obsidian. Frontmatter is supported in Obsidian. You can even do really fancy stuff like automatically inserting time and date stamps into your frontmatter.
How have I not done this before???
I created a template. It’s got all the relevant frontmatter already in it. The date and time is automatically inserted into the frontmatter. I can literally just start typing. The only thing I have to update now is the blog title and the permalink (since it’s based on the blog title). This is making things much easier for me.
At this point, I’m still manually copying these posts directly into GitHub. That’s still a rub. It’s annoying, but really it’s just a copy and paste at this point. Still, I’m seeing a GitHub plugin in that list. Is that the next step in my Obsidian journey? In theory, it could take the last really stupid part out of my current workflow. It might just be my next experiment.
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