about ¹

I use obsidian ² and GitHub Pages to manage my personal notes and content for this website.

Read too much about the indie web ³, digital gardens ⁴, and I love looking at personal websites ⁵. So, with a directory of markdown notes and an existing github pages site, I’ve merged the two and published the result.

The public pages get updated/expanded on very very intermittently. To see how recently a page was updated/how out of date it is, the top footnote/sidenote should always include created & updated dates.

caveats:

• More personal notes are private ⁶ and are often uninteresting, so a lot is private.
• I’m no good at frontend :(

writing

At the moment I use obsidian, I previously used silverbullet but it was too ugly. The structure of my notes isn’t particularly interesting, I have root public/ and private/ folders and what’s in the public folder gets published to this site. Within the private folder I have subdirectories for work notes, meeting notes, and my diary, but most everything else is just in one big jumble, with links between notes holding it together.

I back up my notes to a private Github repository, as well as to a NAS server that I also use for [[public/music.md

music]], it’s not exposed to the internet, I just run tailscale7 on it so I can access it when I’m not at home.

Previously I would just have my vimwiki vault set up to use a folder on the same NAS, which worked fine but was a little slow sometimes, it was just terrible to use on mobile.

hosting/publishing

It’s just Github Pages! The folder that contains all the markdown notes is a git repo, and I intermittently push it all to a private Github repo.

templating

I use a v simple custom html template. All I’ve changed from the default is the fonts, added a header for some basic navigation/links to other projects, and the script that handles converting the footnotes to sidenotes.⁸

excluding private notes

In my _config.yml I specify the directories I don’t want to publish to the site, like:

exclude:
  - 'Library/*'
  - 'SETTINGS.md'
  - 'README.md'
  - 'private/*'

Library/ contains things like Silverbullet templates, SETTINGS.md contains settings for Silverbullet, and README.md is the repo readme.

Most most MOST importantly private/* makes sure none of my private notes get published, and I leave a link in the homepage to private/index both so I can get to my private notes from my index page when I’m using them locally, and something that I can use as a sanity check to make sure the exclusion is still working.

1. created: 05/05/24, updated: 31/05/25 ↩

2. currently, obsidian, previously silverbullet, previously vimwiki, works with any way of managing markdown-based notes ↩

3. indieweb.org ↩

4. cringe term but maggieappleton.com/garden-history ↩

5. like this are.na/nico-chilla/website-as-a-home ↩

6. my diary’s in there lol ↩

7. 😍 tailscale 😍 ↩

8. sidenotes ↩