How I write and publish the microblog

This microblog, by the way… I felt like real blog posts on macwright.com were becoming too “official” feeling to post little notes-to-self and tech tricks and whatnot.

The setup is intentionally pretty boring. I have been using Obsidian for notetaking, and I store micro blog posts in a folder in Obsidian called Microblog. The blog posts have YAML frontmatter that’s compatible with Jekyll, so I can just show them in my existing, boring site, and deploy them the same way as I do the site - with Netlify.

I use the Templater plugin, which is powerful but unintuitive, to create new Microblog posts: key line is

<% await tp.file.move("/Microblog/" + tp.file.creation_date("YYYY[-]MM[-]DD")) %>

This moves a newly-created Template file to the Microblog directory with a Jekyll-friendly date prefix. Then I just have a command in the main macwright.com repo that copies over the folder:

microblog:
  rm -f _posts/micro/*.md
  cp ~/obsidian/Documents/Microblog/* _posts/micro

This is using Just, which I use as a simpler alternative to Makefiles, but… it’s just, you know, a cp command. Could be done with anything.

So, anyway - I considered Obsidian Publish but I don’t want to build a digital garden. I have indulged in some of the fun linking-stuff-to-stuff patterns that Obsidian-heads love, but ultimately I think it’s usually pointless for me.