I’ve decided to rebuild my blog (again.. yes.. I know) using Quartz. I’ve gone through a few different static site generators and really liked them, but the one area where they have consistently failed me is being able to easily write and publish a post.
My reality pre-Obsidian
Quite a number of years ago, I realized that static site generators were VASTLY superior in both performance and ease of management, and I am a huge advocate of Markdown as my editing / formatting tool of choice. The tension for me was that I used several tools as my personal knowledge management solution, from Bear to Craft Notes — even Apple Notes for a while, but the one thing they all shared was ‘lock in’. My workflow for publishing my blog became completely separate from my ‘every day’ note taking.
Enter Obsidian
A few years ago, I tried Obsidian for (maybe) the third time, but for some reason this time it stuck. After maintaining a parallel process for writing notes (in markdown) and writing blog posts (in markdown), it was obvious that I needed the two things to come together.
Quartz - the missing link
Quartz is the engine that makes it all work for me. Now I have a folder in Obsidian simply called ‘Blog’ and whenever I drop a file in there, Obsidian Sync pushes it to my headless Obsidian running on my blog server, which triggers the Quartz build process, and updates my static blog. It happens in the blink of an eye.
Conclusion
I really hope that this workflow is the beginning of a new era for me where I can throw blog posts up with more frequency and less friction.