#5

The root problem here is that readers’ mental model of interacting with a writer is books, blogs, and columns—periodical formats. You subscribe, and then you receive new content when it comes out. That doesn’t quite work with a linked thinking model without some of the mechanisms I described at the top of this thread.

Thanks for the clarification! Maybe a model that would be useful is the doke.li which does allow subscription to blocks/pages/etc (IIRC!)? Your comparison here to periodical literature is illustrative and I’ll take a look at some of the LIS literature on how libraries handle changes as well!

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#6

dokie.li is fascinating. And yes, share anything that comes to mind!

1 Like
#7

I’m looking to migrate my blog DAObase.org from Ghost to Obsidian Publish and have been thinking about this too. You’ll notice from the DAObase.org/discover page that I’ve been wanting to enable concept-oriented exploration of the blog for a while now.

These are my current thoughts for translating an Obsidian wiki into a newsletter:

  1. Host the vault in GitHub and use the commit history as a changelog

  2. Deliver the changelog to readers via one (or all) of the following methods:

  • Block Referenced Digest: Write a standard newsletter format, summarizing the changes that were made since the last digest, block referencing to the changes.
  • Copy Above Digest into Substack: After publishing the above digest to Obsidian Publish, copy paste into Substack. I can confirm that all of the publish.obsidian.md wikilinks are preserved when pasting into the Substack composer, which means the newsletter itself is a funnel into your Obsidian site, and you benefit from Substack’s discoverability. I haven’t tested how effectively block references/embeds paste.
  • RSS Feed / Automated Newsletter: GitHub automatically generates an Atom feed of your repo’s commits. This could be used in combination with the buttondown.email API, which can “programmatically generate emails”. I’m not sure how effective an automatically generated list of commits would be vs a manually curated digest, but I’m thinking I could offer both as separate mailing lists. I’m also curious if I could somehow tag specific commits to help curate which commits make it into the automated update.
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#8

Thanks for the detailed writeup. I think you’re onto something—rolling up committed changes and then reporting them in itemized fashion seems interesting.

I think you also might be able to use Releases (a GitHub feature) to package or “version” updates. Readers who want to follow voraciously can see every commit, and then readers who just want the big (summarized) changes can see releases.

2 Likes
#9

Hey all, this is a really neat conversation! I’ve been mulling over some of these ideas and it came up in discord also (Discord). I thought I would re-post my thoughts here, where it seems relevant:

"Probably my favorite thing about andy’s notes (About these notes) are the conversations that reference his notes around the internet. I didn’t spend much time in his notes at first, but then people started posting links to various topics around the internet. However, this can break when the publisher makes changes. (e.g. Say Bob sends Alice a link to a note that no longer or exists or makes a reference to a point in the note that has changed)

We’ve seen this with APIs, which now often contain version numbers in urls. I wonder if something like that could be added to publish to help preserve the expected context of the link (but perhaps instead of version numbers they are the commit hash IDs…or have both and publishers can treat note publishing like software releases; e.g. new versions may fundamentally change things, while smaller releases do not).

Bonus: If the publisher does not like a previous version, specific notes at specific commits can be deleted or privatized."

[[ https://notes.short2things.io/versioning-published-notes/ | context ]]

3 Likes
#10

An interesting conversation. I came across it as a new Obsidian user who likes the idea of publishing notes but who also has an existing blog. I’ve always equated blog with RSS for the benefits it provides, and was looking for ways to see how people handle it with Obsidian publish.

This article Does Your Blog Really Need to Provide an RSS Feed Anymore? generated some useful ideas. While obviously just their numbers, my experience is that most people don’t know what RSS is. Generating a periodic email with a change log is what most can handle. Sadly, if I were a user, I’d have to do more clicks to get to content, nevermind having to write summaries and an email as an author.

At present I’m trying to get my Obsidian Publish site hooked in under my existing blog site. That’s a mix of Gatsby, Gatsby Cloud, Netlify and of course Obsidian. I’ve come to learn the Gatsby Cloud link intermediary is redundant but I’m still testing. With this model I’d have blog articles which automatically generate RSS, that would reference a growing body of supported notes. I may then create an email model on top of that.

Another thought that came up re RSS is that it is not the means by which I find new content. That’s always Google/DuckDuckGo search. From there, if I see something I like I’ll look for RSS.

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#11

Obsidian now displays a date created and last modified feature. It seems like there’s space for a plugin (or perhaps a core feature) that could help solve some of this problem by wrapping up some links for which notes have changed in the last (specified) time period as well as which notes are new. Even as the notes author, I think I’d find that list quite useful.

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#12

Following up from this, are you seeing your obsidian pages showing up in Google searches? I am published on a sub-domain but nothing is showing which is a bit concerning. I have a blog but don’t want to create a link for every single page.

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#13

I haven’t started using it yet so can’t test or confirm, though I also find that concerning. I thought I had read somewhere that SEO wouldn’t be affected by using Obsidian

#14

It could be that I don’t fully understand it yet but I’d expect links from my blog to get into the Obsidian brain and for those links to be followed. It could be that it’s just all too new (< 2 weeks) but I am seeing new blog posts get picked up.

Possibly also that the redirect from my site to publish.obsidian.md is causing things to not be linked.

I don’t have the ability to get the insight to work out what’s really going on.

#15

Hey @dcb if you are on the Discord server, it might be possible that Licat can help you figure out what’s going on. There shouldn’t be any issues with Google picking up publish sites that we are aware of.

2 Likes
#16

Thanks. I’ll give it a few more days to make sure it’s all settled down.

#17

Maybe it’s a bit of Baader-Meinhof since I saw the RSS help thread yesterday, but I ran into this reddit post for MkDocs Newsletter. I think the interesting parts for you are:

Every time you build the site, the plugin will inspect the git history and create the new newsletter articles under the docs/newsletter directory and configure the Newsletter section.

The entrypoints for the authors are:

And this one, about only adding certain types of commits:

The plugin assumes that you’re using the Angular semantic versioning format to create the commits. Adapted to a documentation repository such as the digital gardens, the structure would be:

{type_of_change}({file_changed}): {short_description}

{full_description}

[…]
For example:

feat(adr): introduce the Architecture Decision Records

[ADR](https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture_decision_record) are
short text documents that captures an important architectural decision made
along with its context and consequences.

Only changes of type feat, fix, perf or refactor will be added to the newsletter. The reader is not interested in the others.

Maybe there is enough ideas there to borrow from the existing code (that only works with MKdocs sites I assume) to make it work for any git-based blog. It might also be a thing to consider for a Publish feature request: Adding a small text box to the modal where you select the files you want to publish, and parse its contents according to some format to generate RSS feeds similarly to the post above.

1 Like
#18

Hi @rscottjones, where are the date created and modified that you mention? I can’t see it anywhere on my Obsidian Publish page.

#19

I only see it on the desktop version.

#20

The date metadate is not embed in your notes, it’s associated with the marddown file and can be seen in any file explorer

#21

You can use dataview plugin to generate a note with recent modified notes listed.

Install the plugin and insert this snippet in a note:

LIST FROM ""
SORT file.mtime desc

will list most recently modified files

21-09-02_QQtIapeG
21-09-02_QQtIapeG1218×756 24.6 KB

#22

Good call. I don’t think this would be rendered as-is on Publish, though—so the user would have to copy+paste the list for readers. Unless I’m mistaken!

(If you do copy+paste the list, I wrote a Templater script to create a list of wikilinks from the clipboard: Paste clipboard into list of wikilinks · Discussion #173 · SilentVoid13/Templater · GitHub)

#23

Greetings @ryanjamurphy

I took a look at Obsidian a while back for a data-driven web publishing project I am pondering in order to sort/discuss academic literature. I was disappointed initially in some lacking features. This week I came back and have been notably impressed with the advances the in the software over the past 1-2 years. Plus your Vantage plugin is absolutely perfect for the type of data I want to organize/present.

So I was thrilled… until I just realized that neither DataView nor Vantage Search will work with Obsidian Publish.

Your analysis is spot-on regarding the issues involved in “sharing linked thinking.” Clearly you have put a huge amount of effort into improving this part of the web.

That said - as much as I like the idea of “owning” my data on my local computer, perhaps the best solution to all of this is that it needs to be a true web app?

One solution would be for Obsidian to host a web server, similar to what Devonthink does.
But assuming that is unlikely to happen, what are your thoughts on Coda.io, which supports “linked thinking on the web” right out of the box:

#24

I like the idea of a solution similar to DEVONthink’s web server, but I’m more excited by Publish adding some kind of feed feature. We’ll see if that’ll ever happen!

I haven’t tried Coda, sorry.