The Viability of using Obsidian as a publication platform?

Knowledge management
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I’m contemplating a subscription service for a Obsidian based publication on several academic topics such as software development and U/UX Design (and other topics). My thought is to use Gumroad to have a free version and higher tier versions. Thoughts on how viable something like this would be?

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It’s definitely doable to use Obsidian to publish, tho as with any kind of web publishing there are annoying compromises. The official Obsidian Publish is (reportedly) easy, but not cheap (and if JavaScript fails to load for a visitor due to spotty signal or whatever, it will display no text). There are static site generators, which unfortunately are mostly designed for computer people and so tend to be technical to set up. (It bothers me so much that there still isn’t a really easy way for people to publish online with text files that they can easily move and backup.) A sort of middle ground (tho can still befuddle to customize) is Blot, which publishes a Dropbox folder of files as a website. (I started using it for approved but decided to just use a text editor instead of Obsidian with it; I don’t recall why.)

I’m not sure how up to date this list of options is: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-publish-alternatives/. If you use it and a lot seems outdated, let me know and I’ll try to get it fixed up.

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It’s plenty viable and it’s a semi-popular way of generating a simple static site, but as Cawlin said, there’s a lot of trade-offs.

There’s several options for converting Markdown to the necessary HTML, all with varying degrees of complexity. Some require extensive coding knowledge, others only require relatively little. All of them require some, to a degree. I’ve found Eleventy is one of the easier ones that still works well, but “easier” just means you don’t need as much HTML, CSS, and JavaScript know-how.

I have heard about a newer hosting group, https://hosted.md, who claim to automatically convert Markdown to HTML, but I haven’t had a chance to play with them myself and haven’t heard a lot about them. I was planning on throwing a small thing together on their free tier hosting over the upcoming holiday weekend to test them out. Once I had a chance to play with them over the weekend, I was going to write a review on them here.

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When I read this, I thought “publish” as in writing academic papers or reports. I have several Pandoc reports in Obsidian. Landing pages, marketing campaigns, and other supporting materials are also in Obsidian. I create a PDF or ePUB of the report for digital download. Revisions are handled in Obsidian.

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If you wanted to do some web publishing I’d recommend looking at Vitepress: What is VitePress? | VitePress

All that would be needed is a starting template for obsidian users and perhaps a git plugin for syncing (pushing, pulling changes) etc.

I’m tinking more “local-first” distribution though.

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How is the formatting of the PDF and ePUB? Can you set your own page breaks, margins etc?

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What do you like about it over other options?

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  1. It uses VueJS (I like vue)
  2. The support is great (I use a channel in the Vue discord for support)
  3. Astro looks good but Vuepress is specifically for documentation (has good features for it).
  4. I built my website with it and it was a pleasant experience.
  5. There is an obsidian-vue plugin (haven’t tried it but not sure if there are plugins for other frameworks).