Aaron Kelly's Blog

Turning notes into blogs

I use Obsidian as my primary note-taking application, and I think its great.

But one day while I was gazing up into the sky, I wondered… could I turn my notes into blog posts? And could I publish my notes to various blogging platforms without having to change the way that I took notes in Obisidan?

Obsidian do offer a publishing service, but it’s expensive, and why pay for something easy, when I can embark of months of personal toil trying to do the same thing for free?

And so began my journey to write my own plugins to do make this possible.

Github pages

You can host your own blog on Github Pages for free. Github Pages has native support for Jekyll, a powerful blogging platform which can build a static HTML site for you… as long as you follow the rules.

I initially started with a simple bash script, which as part of a post-commit build pipeline, would made some modifications to my posts to make them Jekyll friendly.

I had many challenges:

• generating lists of posts, which required mo to write my own bash scripts, and then eventually learn the Liquid templating language
• learning about Jekyll gems and how to use them
• linking between articles, the soul of what my makes a blog great, would not work
• coming up for solutions to exclude articles that were still in-progress

The script that I wrote is here. It’s currently very ugly, but becoming more beautiful every day.

Plugins for publishing to different blog hosts

I think I should continue to write my blog in obsidian, but have different plugins (scripts) for converting them to the target platform

github pages

To solve the broken links problem, I did try this, but it doesn’t work: https://github.com/benbalter/jekyll-relative-links

Apart from writing my own plugins - what FREE static html publishing tools are out there?

https://github.com/kmaasrud/oboe

https://github.com/srid/neuron/