Understanding digital garden creation with Obsidian

Knowledge management
2

Hey @renerodriguez… I’m not familiar with “Neuron” and a search turns up this: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/neuron

As a developer, I’m going at this in perhaps a different way and using the tools that currently exist and that I know how to use…which might not be very non-developer friendly. :upside_down_face:

So here’s my approach:

  1. The files Obsidian uses are just regular Markdown formatted text files.
  2. The files a SSG (static site generator) uses, like 11ty, are just regular Markdown files with Frontmatter.
  3. The wiki-style links [[page-name]] are great, very user-friendly, but they don’t conform to the Markdown spec and aren’t used in regular markdown pages. Instead, links are created with [link text](theURL). So I use the regular Markdown style of links in my Obsidian pages and Obsidian is just fine with it. They are not as convenient as the wiki-style links, but I write in Markdown so much that it’s just muscle memory to create the links via Markdown syntax.
  4. So, if I use the regular markdown link structure, and add Frontmatter to my pages (which Obsidian doesn’t care about) I can then:
    • use an SSG (11ty) to create a very simple website, where the “content” is an Obsidian vault,
    • using a free GitHub account, create a repository to store my 11ty site,
    • edit them locally with either VSCode or Obsidian,
    • push new pages or updates to Github via git
    • and host that 11ty website for free at Netlify…which automatically updates every time I push an update or new file to GitHub.
    • Still use Obsidian locally to view the graph, backlinks, etc.

To your question regarding “private” pages, you could have a Frontmatter variable, for example “private:” that when empty (false) means the page will show. But when set “private: true” will be filtered and won’t show on the website. I use something similar but call it “draft:” which is “false” when empty.

11ty also has an .eleventyignore file and if you wanted to organize your private pages in their own folder, (Obsidian supports folders) you could just create a “/private” folder and then specify it in the .eleventyignore file and ALL files in that folder would not even be processed by 11ty.

All that being said…If a person doesn’t know what “git”, “github”, “ssg”, “netlify”, “frontmatter”, or “node.js” means, they won’t be able to publish a static site from their Obsidian vault(s).

…The current best option would be to wait for Obsidian to roll out their Obsidian Publish feature.

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