From an Obsidian vault to a public knowledge network: my current approach

Knowledge management
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I have kept personal notes in Markdown and Obsidian for years. As LLMs made knowledge easier to obtain, I started wondering whether maintaining those notes—and publishing a blog—still had value.

My current answer is that knowledge is not only a collection of documents. It is also the network between ideas: how they support, limit, and challenge one another, and how new material changes an earlier understanding.

I did not rebuild my vault around a new tool. Markdown and the existing folder tree remain the knowledge base, and Obsidian remains my main reading and maintenance interface. I use classification, bidirectional links, and Graph View to connect scattered notes. But more links are not automatically better; what matters is why two notes are related.

An agent helps me find possible relationships and compare new material with earlier notes. It improves the workload and efficiency, but the history of my thinking remains mine, and I make the final judgment.

I then made the public part of this real knowledge network visible as a blog called See the Forest. Its homepage is a constellation of real topics and articles rather than a list of recent posts. You can drag a node, follow its connections, and open the content behind it. Search and text navigation remain available.

Short video:

Live network:

This is not an Obsidian plugin or a downloadable template. I am sharing the PKM approach I use and the public result built from it. The public blog is free to explore.

I would especially appreciate feedback from Obsidian users: does seeing the network first help you choose what to read, or does it get in the way?

See the trees. See the forest.

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Cool personal website. When I open the homepage, the Knowledge Network graph looks really great. I see a people with tons of knowledge. Then I try to dive into the knowledge I’m interested in, it’s a little bit hard for me to explore and find the link to read the article.

One question: If new Markdown file created, how we refresh and publish the whole site? How long it will take?

I write help documents for my SAAS product with Obsidian, I need to edit and publish it frequently. I need local-first preview and one-click publish. So I built a MDFriday Publish (Obsidian Plugin) myself. You just inspired me if we make it for personal branding website, what’s the most important thing for our reader?

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The part that stands out is “connections that show how new material reinterprets previous understanding”, that’s harder to get right than plain topical links. Most graph views just show that two notes touch the same subject, not that note B actually revised or contradicted note A. If you’re already having an agent suggest relations, the interesting problem isn’t finding the connection, it’s picking the right verb for it, and two people describing the same relationship tend to use different words for it too.