I write everything on this site as notes in Obsidian, and a few tools turn those notes into the website you’re reading. Here’s how it fits together.
Obsidian
All pages start as Markdown notes in my Obsidian vault. Notes I want online get publish: true in their properties, everything else stays private. Obsidian is a great tool for writing documents with Markdown formatting, it can be either simple or advanced depending on how you want to use it.
Quartz
Quartz is a static site generator made for Obsidian notes. It turns wikilinks, callouts and tags into a website, and gives me things like the graph view, backlinks and search for free. I recently upgraded from Quartz 4 to Quartz 5, which moved everything to a plugin system and made customizing much easier.
Publishing
The Quartz Syncer plugin pushes my published notes from Obsidian straight to the site’s GitHub repository. A GitHub Actions workflow then builds the site and deploys it to GitHub Pages, on my own domain. From pressing publish to the change being live takes about a minute.
Making it my own
On top of Quartz I’ve added a few custom parts:
- The intro at the top of the homepage
- The animated background, which reacts to your cursor
- Timeline and contact sections that I write as normal callouts in Obsidian
- My own icon and social preview images