It was very much on a whim that I decided to make this. I know I wanted to do something like this for a while but couldn’t ever get started on making the site. I know I’ll be more interested in something if I completely control and customise it, but it also needs to be easy to start and stick with. There’s no real use if it takes ages to get started so I need it to be easy above all else to add to it. I already use Obsidian for general note taking so that’s going to be what I use there. Everything else must build off that. This means markdown, bonus points if it is easy to translate Obsidian flavoured markdown to whatever standard the renderer uses. Markdown is great but every tool seemingly has their own variants or additions to the language so it’ll be a challenge making sure compatibility is 100% across everything

Astro

I started trying to use Astro because I know people have talked about that a bit recently. However I’m not a frontend dev so I decided very early on to rely on AI tools to generate at the very least an initial template I could build off. I found a theme I liked and set it up. But once I got to customising it I ran into roadblock after roadblock and soon gave up. I’m not interested in spending hours and hours getting started so I’m not doing that now. Perhaps down the line I’ll revisit this and redo it all in astro. The big thing about markdown is it is relatively versatile.

Next.js

I’m sorta familiar with this already and it is the big giant in this arena so i thought I’d do something here quickly. But went back on that thought just as quick. Nothing about Next.js is quick and lightweight. It is incredibly powerful but for a simple blog as this it is way too much overkill. Moments after running npx create-next-app I knew I wouldn’t be going this route. I had thoughts of running whatever this site is in Cloudflare for cost and ease but Next.js is famously unfriendly to running it anywhere that is not Vercel.

Hugo

I’ve made sites with this before and never really loved it but for a quick start I thought this worked best. The hugo start tools and Claude quickly got me a template for more or less what I had wanted. The only real challenge was getting content out of Obsidian and into the way Hugo expects it on the filesystem.

As I said, getting started was relatively painless though the themes took a bit of trying as it wasn’t extremely straightforward how to get that working. I didn’t know your best bet is to add the site as a submodule then copy out the example site most themes give. Not doing this means you have to align whatever settings they have with what you have.

The best thing about hugo is speed. Builds and deploys are fast and the site seems to be doing relatively ok speed wise. Perhaps some optimisations would be welcome but for now its more than enough.

Obsidian as note editor.

I read what other people do but I’m not sure I want to go down that road as of yet. However I did pick and choose some elements of each one so I can build off each. The way I decided on was something like this:

  • set up the hugo site as normal following their tutorial getting started
  • edit files in Obsidian as normal but keep them in a separate folder to all else
  • use obsidian-export to copy & transform files into the hugo content/blog folder
  • git commit the updated/new files
  • I’ve configured Cloudflare Pages to deploy on pushing the branch up so changes are relatively quick to show

Some resources

Conclusion

I’m happy enough with this for now. Like I said I’m not against building this again in some other tech and markdown is flexible enough I should be able to move across easily enough.