Obsidian is a favourite of many to taken notes, and been using it myself. You don’t need me to introduce it: check out this video by No Boilerplate.
I have taken to Obsidian a bit differently. As well as using it to take notes, I have started to write posts for my blog. This works great because Hugo will understand the Markdown syntax used in Obsidian.
Why Markdown
Markdown is powerful enough to lay out documents, yet simple to type and read (for humans and machines). If I’m not using Obsidian, I will be using a text editor like Vim or KWrite, where the syntax doesn’t get in the way.
Why Obsidian
Obsidian adds all these features which a text editor doesn’t have, so you can build you second brain:
- Embedding pictures
- Note properties and tags
- Linking between notes
- A cool graph to see those links
- Proofreading mode
- Even easier editing of Markdown
- Optional spell checking
One caveat is that Obsidian is closed source. Though it doesn’t need internet access, hence any of the privacy issues can be avoided. You only need to pay if you want to use extra features like syncing or use it as part of an organisation.
You might have heard of (or use) programs like Evernote or Notion. I think that Obsidian’s greatest advantage is that it lets you store everything on your computer (by default) instead of in their cloud. There is no need to worry about syncing or how much mobile data you have left.
My Workflow: Obsidian + Hugo
Hugo is the web framework I use to make my blog. As I said, it will convert the Markdown files to HTML.
I have a folder on my laptop to store all the drafts, then keep each post as their own file or folder (depending if I want images). When it comes to building the site, all articles get created as folders with index.html files automatically for consistency.
Firstly, I try and structure the article with headings and come up with ideas for what to say in them. Sometimes I can get very far without doing this, but this helps to keep it concise.
The time it takes to write varies, depending on the topic and how motivated I am to get it out. Sometimes I can finish an article in a day or two, others have taken me a few weeks to a month to finish.
On a technical level, the way my Markdown is written has changed slightly (though this doesn’t affect the results). In Obsidian I prefer to use the ATX style headings with hashtags. In a text editor I preferred using the Setext headings which use dashes and equals signs underneath.
You can see the the Setext headings look better in a text editor. In Obsidian they would look more awkward, since they wouldn’t be the same width as the enlarged heading text. Other things are also line breaks between headings and hard wrapping, which aren’t needed but can make using Vim easier.
Once I’m happy with the finished article, I am usually quick to get it published. The first thing to do is create a page with Hugo using hugo new content posts/name/index.md, which will automatically create the front matter to store data like the name, time and tags.
I then use the shell to append the contents of what I’m working on onto the Hugo file, and convert the images over to the webp format. This is done with the cwebp CLI tool, which allows me to resize them very quickly. Once everything is in place, there’s a final read over in the published form with Hugo’s live server. This is where I can pick up any formatting errors.
To publish I push the site folder to a GitHub repository. That way, I can use an action to automatically update the server’s copy and then build it. Everything else is done for me by Hugo. From adding the post to the posts list and also creating it in the RSS feed - This means I can spend more time writing instead of editing code.
What’s Next
- Writing a shell script to resize everything, or using a Hugo render hook.
- Try out Front Matter CMS, a VS Code extension to simplify the management of Hugo.