11 Jul 2026
Blog posts two days in a row? I'm truly spoiling you! This one is a little bit different from what I usually like to do, in that I usually like to talk about projects that are ongoing, or I have finished. This one is a project I am still thinking about - because I haven't figured out how to accomplish it.
Two things that I really like are static site generators and Obsidian. This website is made with Zola, with a nice automated workflow so that whenever I commit and push to git it gets published automatically. My brilliant, passionate partner has also developed a love of Obsidian and markdown. We've both discussed how nice it would be to just be able to write blog posts in Obsidian and get it pushed to your website.
Very easy for a developer to do, not so much for someone not as technically-minded. Install command-line programs, install FTP clients, install and correctly use Git. It's all a bit much I fear. I've gone through it a few hundred times and I can't think of a really great way for this to work. Most ways methods I can think of depend on:
- A command-line static site generator to be installed (too awkward)
- An Obsidian plugin (none are exactly what I'm looking for)
- A Git repository with configuration (again, too awkward)
I feel like this used to be a bit simpler. I'm pretty sure I wrote websites in Netscape Composer and uploaded them to some fly-by-night website hosting company easy enough. The idea of Digital Gardens has gained quite a bit of popularity - and yet even the "batteries included" solutions seem to violate at least one of my issues above. None are truly made so that literally anyone can easily do it!
My thinking at the moment is that I should try to create a Python tool that will take an Obsidian vault called "blog" and use a static site generator to turn it into a website. The output of that can then be uploaded somewhere, all using a GUI that the user never has to leave in order to publish. That Python program can be compiled into an executable for all the platforms, and then the user just has to publish through that whenever they want to update their website. It sounds simple enough but that will probably be a pretty huge undertaking.
At the moment this is very much in the "dreams and wishes" stage, and there might be some really obvious solution I am missing, but I think that this could do a lot for people who want to engage with the indie web but just don't have the skills (at the moment) to get started.