Obsidian as a blog
do i have anything interesting to say?
Short answer: Probably not really. š£
Long answer:
- ā The idea of a blog has always been interesting.
- ā I never felt like I had anything of value to say.
- ā I did not like the idea of giving up control of my writing, by using some hosted service. Someday, the servers could shut down and all of my work would be gone.
- ā My every day life is not that exciting.
- ā I've never found anyone else's blogs to be particularly engaging, so why start my own?
why start my own?
You know when you have some very specific issue that you cannot seem to resolve on your own, and you inevitably start googling:
- "how to fix my problem"
- "how to fix my problem reddit"
- "how fix problem"
As you get increasingly more desperate for any kind of answer, you end up reading forum posts from 2008. That's what I want to be. A forum from 2008.
Basically, my idea is that I want to document and share the problems and solutions to various issues I've run into -mostly tech related- in hopes that it could help someone else in the future. Maybe even just some simple how-to posts about setting up an NGINX reverse proxy, building executables with pyinstaller, etc.
obsidian (and markdown)
As I grow older, time moves much faster and I feel the pressure to learn more rapidly - it quickly became clear to me that I needed:
- Some mechanism by which to document and store reproducible steps to rebuild my projects
- Some way to quickly retrieve said documentation on any device
- A procedure that did not involve physical paper
- Something lightweight
You probably see where this is going. Obsidian was the solution I landed on.
I was introduced to this absolute unit of a program by my friend and former band mate Jay. I was at his house for his 30th birthday. He introduced us to Obsidian and brought up the idea of writing down and linking some bands and genres together in order to come up with permutations of themes and instruments - then have a jam session based on those ideas. He showed us the graph view, which was pretty neat, but I don't remember this concept working especially well in this group setting. I think we just ended up playing whatever we wanted. Even though the note -> jam session pipeline didn't work that well, I was sold after Jay explained that this was using exclusively locally stored text files! š
I won't go into great detail about what Obsidian is or why it's good. Basically, I'm vim-pilled, so I like text. I fell in love with Obsidian and now my whole life is text. Journals, notes, documentation, funny memories, birthday gift ideas, everything. Text.
blog time
I came across a GitHub repo called Obsidian-Blogger which seemed like a good jumping off point for getting this web page off the ground. However, I do plan on writing my own custom Next.js solution some time in the future. I've used react-markdown in the past for 200 Lounge so I think I could make it happen. I want to study this repo a bit, as it uses frontmatter quite nicely for formatting and SEO. I would guess it just parses the frontmatter text into meta tags in the <head> of the page? Not sure, didn't look too closely yet.
Anyway - this was mostly a test post. Embedded pictures don't seem to be working, but the text seems fine. Thanks for reading! I'll write more stuff probably maybe hopefully.