Obsidian and Finding My Voice

Notetaking Woes

I’ve always wanted to get into the habit of digital note-taking over traditional handwritten notes, which I always find very straining for my hands. Naturally, using an app as an alternative would be ideal. I stumbled upon Nick Milo’s video one day that masterfully held me at gunpoint and hypnotized me into joining the cult of Obsidian. It sold me hard enough into actually using the app and convinced me to go beyond just taking notes and creating a website from scratch to integrate remotely integrate Obsidian, just the way I desired.

Prior to Obsidian, my attempts begun from OneNote, Apple Notes, Google Keep, and to Notion, none of which held my attention for long. As a web development student, I had three core requirements:

1. •It has to be a markdown editor;
2. •To be able to push and publish the things I’ve written into deployment;
3. •and, to be able to do it at any device.

The last point is important for me because I want to increment and complete my drafts and write-ups at a moment’s notice, even while lying down. I try to capture thoughts before they dissolve into nothingness.

I’ve tried Notion for a time because of it being cross-platform and being quite accessible. I wrote my own guides there raiding Futures Rewritten (Ultimate) in FFXIV so I was able to continue writing and study while in my university’s lab. After a while I just lost reason to use Notion, aside from remembering that the platform exist for me to track project ideas and to-do lists during my internship.

Beyond that, most platforms (in my opinion) share a personal turn-off: you’re always being taken advantage of with annoying and pretentious marketing of products and services unrelated to note-taking.

About Obsidian

This brings us to the subject of the article Obsidian, a local and personal knowledgebase operating on simply markdown files with an incredible environment of community-driven extensions to enrich your information vault. It offers services such as cloud saving, publishing, and commercial licenses. I got to know Obsidian from random Twitter and Reddit users posting their clean and neat setups catered to their studying and productivity. It gave me back my motivation to write things again.

As to how Obsidian perfectly satisfies my requirements:

1. •Obsidian operates on plain-text .md files. This means they’re future-proof and can be opened on any text-editor such as VSC.
2. •Through GitHub, a simple git push with the Obsidian Git plugin will reflect any note changes.
3. •Obsidian has a mobile app. I’ll be able to write and edit notes with my phone and sync back changes to my PC.

These characteristics brought up plenty of ideas in my mind and installed it with no issue at all with the aforementioned guide by Nick Milo. I had prior experience with markdown and BBCode from all my years of using forums leading up to now so the syntaxes and formatting were all familiar and intuitive.

Defining My Requirements

Basic Workflow

After getting accustomed to the app, I devised my simple process of adding new notes to my vault for publishing:

1. •Open Obsidian and create a new note into my Drafts folder.
2. •Insert a generic template with standard frontmatter.
3. •Begin writing, format the notes in Markdown, and add images and components to roughly mimic the final product for the website.
4. •Increment and finish the whole piece before committing to push changes to GitHub, where my vault is backed up in a private repository.
5. •Check and ensure that the article looks good!

It’s a very easy framework to go off of that kept the current build of this website intact and avoided feature creep as I developed the system.

Templates and Drafts

Frontmatter is the block of metadata at the top of an md file separated by ---. In the system, it automatically handles setting media previews through the title and logical filters using type (the kind of article it is), series (grouping articles by topic), and tags to describe the article. Here’s what the metadata on this very post looks like:

---
title: Obsidian and Finding My Voice
series: Obsidian Workflow
description: "How Obsidian allowed me to start my longtime interest in blogging and the creation of this website"
type: post
date: 2026-04-09
modified: 2026-04-10
tags:
  - obsidian
  - productivity
published: true
bluesky:
  did:
  postCid: 
---

The bluesky parameters for did and postCid is something I added later on for development for the Comment system.

Connecting the Vault and the Web

One of the more exhilarating parts of this project was the prospect of building a seamless pipeline from my private and personal Obsidian vault to this website that I can show to everyone publicly. I wanted to write in Obsidian, with its isolated and comfortable suite of plugins, and publish what was written with minimal to no copy-pasting or reformatting at all.

After some research, the vision for my vault was to turn my private vault into a headless CMS.

GitHub Integration

My Obsidian vault resides in a private GitHub repository which contains _blog/published/. Inside this folder houses all things I want published and are organized by type via folders review/, note/, guide/, and post/. As fallback, the project root itself has the content/ folder with the same logic that reads local files, which is very helpful for instantaneous editing without internet.

When there’s changes to push, a number of things occur:

1. •The site recursively walks through the _blog/published directory looking for .md files to parse its frontmatter and content.
2. •Remote posts are cached for a while to avoid rate limits. They’re then merged with any local posts in content/. If a remote post shares the same slug and type as a local one, the remote version takes precedence.
3. •Images embedded in Obsidian notes are referenced locally (e.g., banner.jpg). The site’s /api/blog-image endpoint first tries to serve the image from the local content/ folder; if it’s not found, it fetches the raw file directly from GitHub. This means I can drop a screenshot into my vault, reference it with a simple filename, and it just works on the web.

In the end, using my own vault was the content source meant I never have to touch a database.

Custom MDX Components

To make the writing experience truly seamless, I built some custom MDX components that mimic Obsidian’s syntax and aesthetics. While Obsidian only sees standard Markdown, my Next.js build process interprets specific patterns (i.e., callout blocks or highlights) and swaps them with React components at compile time. For example:

• •> [!note] blockquotes become collapsible callouts with custom labelling and color‑coded headers.
• •==highlighted text== renders as a soft yellow mark.
• •[[wikilinks]] are transformed into proper internal links.

These components were born out of my own theme and usage patterns over the years. By making the web output near-identical to my Obsidian theme, I can reach a point where I can focus entirely on my writing. I no longer have to bother with markdown and wonder how a specific element will look: “if it looks right in my vault, I know it will look right on this website.” Hopefully.

Obsidian Plugins

The Obsidian plugin ecosystem is what makes this entire workflow possible. Below are what I deem essential:

• •Templater - Inserting frontmatter templates with dynamic dates.
• •Obsidian Git - Automatically commit and push changes to GitHub.
• •Media DB - Query using various APIs to fetch series, books, manga, movies, music, and video games and import them into your vault.
• •Dataview - Query my vault by tag, status, or series.
• •Style Settings - Customize the CSS of Obsidian. My theme is LYT Anuppucin.

Pairing these plugins together allows me to turn Obsidian into a lightweight and free CMS that respects my data ownership.

What’s Next?

Well, the system is still being developed but here’s some ideas:

• •Comments
• •Guestbook

(May 12, 2026) As of writing, both comments and guestbook is finished. If there are any new ideas I’ll update this section.

This blog and website as a whole is a reflection of my growth as a developer and a hobbyist. Thanks to Obsidian, the plugin community, and everyone else involved in creating the technology making this digital garden of mine possible.