How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare • Hacker News Board

Re: How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare

#181

Post by jerf » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 7:43 PM UTC

Lammy wrote: post #178

victorbjorklund wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because then you have 200 blog posts and suddenly you realize "oh I wanna add an author section to all my blog posts". That is 200 files to edit. Could you write a script to do the edit? Sure, but then you pretty much build a static site generator.

`sed -i` is one command: https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/sed.html#index-_002d...

And you built a static site generator.

Or at least, you will have as you realize things like you only wanted to do that on certain categories or whathaveyou.

You can in principle just write HTML with no script support, but it itself becomes an exercise in conspicuous asceticism. It is not unreasonable to want things like "the last 5 posts" on every page on a blog, or an RSS feed, or any number of other very basic, simple things that are impractical with an editor and raw HTML.

Re: How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare

#182

Post by anon7000 » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 7:51 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #170

ipsento606 wrote: post #167

> This stack gives me full control: no subscriptions, no vendor lock-in, > and no risk of platforms disappearing or changing policies. I'm not trying to dunk on the author, but this sentiment encapsulates a tremendous paradigm shift in the meaning of "full control", compared to say: * Writing in obsidian * Syncing files via git * Publishing via nginx hosted on the cheapest possible vps (with https via let's encrypt)…

The point is that because of the way they structured their blog it would be trivial to do exactly this if they ever needed to. There's no complicated export from a locked in application, you just move your blog files from one host to another (maybe to your own VPS). The overhead of switching from Cloudflare to a VPS if they needed to is really not that much larger than switching from one VPS to another, so they likel…

Similarly, Obsidian is just a markdown editor. So you're not even relying on their free tier; you could use any other markdown editor on the planet with the same results. Or any cloud file syncing tool.

Re: How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare

#183

Post by killingtime74 » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 7:53 PM UTC

wood_spirit wrote: post #180

I set up a friend’s prolific blog with a very similar approach many years ago using pelican and pushing to a git server vps where a tiny custom python wevserver serves whatever is in git. Only friend has struggled to get pelican and git etc set up on a new laptop. And tbh I am lost - and horrified - at the latest windows. Not keen on being tech support and working out why python command hangs etc. And my custom vps s…

Maybe your friend should pay someone (not you) for tech support. It shouldn't take that long

Re: How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare

#184

Post by anon7000 » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 8:02 PM UTC

Vingdoloras wrote: post #174

Cool setup, but the choice of Obsidian is kind of weird in this context (in an interesting way, see next paragraph). Instead of opening a subfolder of the Hugo project in Obsidian, one could just open the entire thing in VSCode or a similar IDE, enjoy a good markdown editing experience, AND use git integration and the integrated terminal (and possibly set up automated tasks) to run your local testing and deployment w…

I mean, Obsidian is just a markdown editor. You could keep an identical publishing setup and use any text editor on the planet :P

But I honestly despise writing raw markdown in an IDE. If I'm writing (not coding), I need it to be somewhat visual, which means I want WYSIWYG -- and Obsidian is an excellent markdown editor, even if you don't use the other features.

My reasons for not liking writing "raw" markdown:

- Long links take up too much space. I put it in text so it'd be hidden

- No syntax highlighting in code blocks

- Text wrapping/font is typically not configured for easy reading of text

- A ton of markdown features are for visual formatting. Highlighting, bold, underline, strike-through, inline code, etc. If you stay in raw IDE no-preview, you never get the visual benefits.

- When I'm using markdown, I'm often mostly reading, and doing some writing, but even when I'm writing, I'm re-reading what I wrote constantly. It's annoying to switch to preview mode. Writing mode in IDEs isn't a pleasant reading experience unless you do a lot of configuration. (depending on the IDE of course)

I mean, writing raw md is fine for tiny little things. But because reading & writing are so linked, I don't like separate modes for each. I want to write in the visual mode I read in.

Re: How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare

#185

Post by sureglymop » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 8:03 PM UTC

hk1337 wrote: post #112

I've started recently working on setting up the "special" public profile repository in GitHub to be my blog central and wanted to keep the files to a minimum. So, I really like using themes as modules in Hugo, then your blog repository will be just your content directory, go.mod, go.sum, hugo.toml, and any layouts you want to override or add. . ├── .devcontainer │ └── devcontainer.json ├── content │ └── posts │ ├── 1…

Just out of curiosity, what would the Hugo toml file look like and do you use multiple themes?

Re: How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare

#186

Post by sureglymop » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 8:08 PM UTC

dtkav wrote: post #151

bad_username wrote: post #144

> notes sync seamlessly across devices Droobox and similar services have never been seamless for me with Obsidian. There will inevitably be some conflict when the same file gets edited on two machines, and an ugly conflict file will appear, with no easy way to resolve it without a specialized diff tool. Sometimes this conflict file will get unnoticed and a change will fall theough the cracks. Not a deal breaker - but…

You might be interested in our real-time collaboration plugin for Obsidian called Relay [0]. Relay attaches a CRDT to the Obsidian editor. It makes collaboration really smooth and removes conflicts. Markdown collaboration is free, but we do charge for attachment/media storage. If you dm me (@dtkav) on our discord [1] or email me (in my profile) I'm happy to give out free storage to HN folks. One other benefit of usin…

Very interesting! A while ago I worked on a toy project that would allow for realtime collaboration for obsidian vaults located on a nextcloud instance.

Basically, I saw that nextcloud built their own realtime text editor based on TipTap so I created an obsidian extension to connect to it.

Unfortunately work and uni got in the way but it was a very interesting idea/learning experience.

Re: How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare

#187

Post by sureglymop » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 8:11 PM UTC

Lately I've been trying out Astro for my blog and it's actually kind of nice. I like how actively it gets developed.

What I regret though was using Tailwind. Mainly because I later couldn't find a straightforward way to just use normal CSS and ignore that within the scope of some component/page.

Re: How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare

#188

Post by dtkav » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 8:12 PM UTC

sureglymop wrote: post #186

dtkav wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be interested in our real-time collaboration plugin for Obsidian called Relay [0]. Relay attaches a CRDT to the Obsidian editor. It makes collaboration really smooth and removes conflicts. Markdown collaboration is free, but we do charge for attachment/media storage. If you dm me (@dtkav) on our discord [1] or email me (in my profile) I'm happy to give out free storage to HN folks. One other benefit of usin…

Very interesting! A while ago I worked on a toy project that would allow for realtime collaboration for obsidian vaults located on a nextcloud instance. Basically, I saw that nextcloud built their own realtime text editor based on TipTap so I created an obsidian extension to connect to it. Unfortunately work and uni got in the way but it was a very interesting idea/learning experience.

wow, that's awesome! Did you open-source it? I'd love to take a look.

Re: How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare

#189

Post by blackoil » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 8:19 PM UTC

6stringmerc wrote: post #114

ingav wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m using “fully owned” more in the sense of control rather than infrastructure ownership. The content lives locally, it’s versioned in Git, and everything’s built with open tools. I can move it to another host any time without being locked into a specific platform or format. I agree it’s not “self-hosted”. But compared to a closed CMS or paid platform, it feels meaningfully more in my hands.

But if they kill your access to those accounts do you have a method to force them to let you back in to get “your” content? Serious question as I self-publish and use a distribution service for my music but I stop short of your claim. I’m an independent rights holder. I don’t own the platforms upon which I choose to distribute my work - terminology does matter and, well, you’re claiming something basically untrue bec…

As long as domain control isn't lost, he can quickly move from Github to Gitlab/gitee/self hosted and from CloudFlare to Netlify/DO/AWS.

Re: How I blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare

#190

Post by mrbombastic » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 8:32 PM UTC

anon7000 wrote: post #184

Vingdoloras wrote: post #174

Cool setup, but the choice of Obsidian is kind of weird in this context (in an interesting way, see next paragraph). Instead of opening a subfolder of the Hugo project in Obsidian, one could just open the entire thing in VSCode or a similar IDE, enjoy a good markdown editing experience, AND use git integration and the integrated terminal (and possibly set up automated tasks) to run your local testing and deployment w…

I mean, Obsidian is just a markdown editor. You could keep an identical publishing setup and use any text editor on the planet :P But I honestly despise writing raw markdown in an IDE. If I'm writing (not coding), I need it to be somewhat visual, which means I want WYSIWYG -- and Obsidian is an excellent markdown editor, even if you don't use the other features. My reasons for not liking writing "raw" markdown: - Lon…

I find it annoying that I can get stuck in a mode when I am editing and the app is trying to render at the same time (e.g. I write some backticks to make a code block and Obsidian tries to be smart and add the second set and it encapsulates a bunch of lines I don't want it to) but to each their own I suppose. Vscode for what its worth has a preview that you can keep open side by side to see the visuals as you edit.