This post was written in Obsidian

For the last three years, I was not satisfied with my process of writing blog posts. It was too artisanal, so I always found something less boring to do. Here's how it all changed with my two new favorite tools: SvelteKit and Obsidian.

Every time you see a link, I encourage you to take a look. Most of them are not direct external links, but notes I've made about that topic. Some of the information there can complement what you're reading right now :]

How it was

My previous site, while entirely made by me and very customized, was not 100% easy to maintain. It already used SvelteKit, but in a very, very dumb way. The thing is: I wanted to keep old posts alive, and they were converted to plain HTML, which was served by SvelteKit, and that was that.

That meant that every time I wanted to write something new, I needed to write it in HTML. It's not entirely bad, and allowed me to do some fancy stuff, but it was impractical, to say the least. Because of that, I never posted anything anymore, and didn't want to migrate to something else, since that meant migrating lots of posts from HTML to something like Markdown.

How it changed

It all changed when I discovered Obsidian. If you want to know more about my feelings about it, take a look at the A week with Obsidian post. But what really enticed me to make a blog based on it were two details: it's really easy to write notes on it (like most Markdown-based editors), and that the notes link to each other easily. That blew my mind a little bit, since it meant I could write things fast and give more context through links.

How it is

Now, while I still use SvelteKit for the ease of use and the performance, I decided to go with a mix between two SvelteKit templates: SwyxKit and Svelteland's Markdown Blog Demo. SwyxKit gave me the basic infrastructure and sane visual defaults, while the Markdown Blog Demo gave me the piping necessary to write in Markdown and output HTML.

So I write everything in Obsidian, which makes notes in Markdown, and my SwyxKit Markdown Frankenstein's monster publishes it as HTML. The problem then was moving what was inside of the Obsidian vault to the folder my site expected the posts to be.

To solve that, I used this byotiful python library called obsidianhtml. It's mostly used to generate static sites from an Obsidian vault, but it's flexible enough to do strictly what I want it to: to capture internal links between the notes and substitute them with real links, and output the Markdown files to the blog posts folder of my site. I've made a custom shellscript function to do that for me.

The end result

Now, I can simply open Obsidian, write what I want to write (links, images and all), run a command to export the Markdown files to the site's source code, check that it's working on the site locally, and push the code. Oh, and I've been using Vercel as the hosting/publishing solution (and it's been awesome so far), since it takes care of building the app and publishing the new version.

Be free to take a look at the site's source code and give me feedbacks and suggestions on Twitter! Thanks for your attention, and see you next time :]