Once upon a time, I published a semi-public wiki powered by vimwiki and hosted it on https://wiki.pcalv.es/.

Now that I’m back on Obsidian, I want to do it again. Working with the garage door up and allowing others to peek into my collection of clippings, thoughts, etc.

There’s a few ways this can be accomplished.

The easy one is to use Obsidian Publish. It should Just Work, the monthy fee is pretty acceptable and publishing is integrated into the app. Easy. Boring? Possibly. I’d rather try to roll my own solution.

Here’s a couple of promising tutorials:

• Setting up your own digital garden with Jekyll
• Obsidian Jekyll workflow

After some hours spent trying to set up Ruby and all the required dependencies for Jekyll to run (see 2024-03-28 for fun Interstitial Logs), I’m beginning to see the value of a turnkey solution. But I’m also too deep now to give up. Typical hacker stubborness: sunk cost isn’t so much a fallacy as it is a rallying cry.

Implementation details

Set up https://github.com/pcalves/garden using https://github.com/meewgumi/green-web-template as a starting point. This is a fork of https://github.com/maximevaillancourt/digital-garden-jekyll-template with some nice QoL improvements, especially support for Obsidian images.

Removed the graph renderer and replaced the CSS by the one used in https://pcalv.es. It’s been greatly expanded on since the initial import.

Github Publisher handles merging notes into the repo. I can set which notes should be published using a front matter attribute.

My local notes include People, Clippings and Books. While I don’t want to publish these publicly, I want to be able to link to them in my notes. Each note of that type should have a source URL. Jekyll will display those as external links, and avoid linking to its pages.

Larger notes can become a bit unwieldy to navigate. I want a ToC in the style of Maggie Appleton’s, see this article for a good example.

https://github.com/allejo/jekyll-toc looks like a great solution: zero dependencies, just drag and drop into your own project.

References