How I blog

I want to describe my process of blogging on untilde.co.

Obsidian

I want to be able to jot down a post as quickly as possible. I use Obsidian for a number of different things do enjoy it for writing and editing. I even made a plugin for it.

I have a special folder called public/ in my Obsidian Vault. The individual blogs live in a subdirectory here. Blog posts are numbered for untilde.co so that they appear in order.

Directory structure in Obsidian:

Notes/
	|-- Attachments
public/
|-- untilde/
|-- 01 Knolling
|-- 02 Packing
....
|--- usysrc/
templates/
|-- blogpost

The template for the blog post is applied using the Templater plugin. I use template tags to populate the date into the frontmatter:

---
title: <% tp.file.title %>
draft: false
date: <% tp.file.creation_date("YYYY-MM-DD") %>
tags:
---
Your blogpost here

To build the site from the markdown content I use hugo with a custom theme that I made from scratch called ‘untilde’. I usually have a preview server running with hugo server -D -t untilde.

I then use Commander to execute the scripts from my ribbon in Obsidian. These are needed to sync my writing from the public/untilde folder to the local copy of my blog. I have two buttons: Sync and Publish.

The Sync button executes a python script. This script is the actual workhorse in this process. Essentially it copies and transforms the markdown from Obsidian-style markdown to Hugo-style markdown. It changes the link, updates image embeds to the right path and optimizes the images.

The Publish button cds to the local copy of my blog repo, creates a new git commit and pushes it. That then kicks off the workflow on GitHub:

name: Deploy to Production
on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
jobs:
  prod-deploy:
    name: prod-deploy
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: get latest
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Setup Hugo
        uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v3
        with:
          hugo-version: "0.139.4"
      - name: Build
        run: hugo --minify
      - name: sync files
        uses: SamKirkland/FTP-Deploy-Action@4.3.0
        with:
          server: ${{ secrets.ftp_server }}
          username: ${{ secrets.ftp_user }}
          password: ${{ secrets.ftp_password }}
          local-dir: "public/"

There are many things that could improve about this workflow, but it works, and it makes it super easy to publish something quickly.