Obsidian has been my long-term memory for many years now, but only yesterday I realized how easy it was to also make it my blog editor and thus greatly simplify writing new posts.

I use Jekyll to generate the files for this blog; these files then get served from a free Netlify account. The setup required to integrate Obsidian is minimal: I created a new folder named posts that became the root folder of my new Obsidian vault. Then I moved the existing _posts folder containing all my blog posts as Markdown files in there. Jekyll doesn’t care, as long it can find its _posts folder anywhere, it’s happy. I added an images folder next to _posts to make future image files visible in Obsidian as well. Finally, I added the .obsidian directory to .gitignore to avoid merge conflicts. These are all the changes necessary to use Obsidian; everything else is quality-of-life improvements.

Obsidian is well-known for its plugin ecosystem, and quite a few of them help with writing. I started out with a minimal set of community plugins to keep things simple (and myself from tinkering). All I installed was the Templater plugin to start a new blog post with all the YAML front matter already in place and partly filled-out, and the Quick Add plugin to create a new blog post from my post template with a single hotkey. The post template lives in a folder templates next to _posts; it needs to be excluded from processing in the Jekyll configuration. Finally, I’ve added the Git plugin so I can publish (i.e. git commit and git push) my new posts right from Obsidian.

Since I have Obsidian open all day anyway, starting a new blog post has now become as easy as it can ever be: Hit Alt-Shift-q. All I have to do now is write. That then might turn out not to be quite as easy, but that’s a problem Obsidian can’t solve.