Obsidian is primarily a note-taking tool that uses Markdown files for speed and flexibility. The official site is https://obsidian.md/.
Within Obsidian I document and link:
- Personal journal entries
- Digital Garden notes
- My consumption of books, movies and TV shows
This website is published directly from Obsidian using Quartz 4. Content is created in Obsidian using Markdown and then converted to static HTLM by Quartz.
Sync Between Devices
I use the official [Obsidian Sync] service to securely share my vault between my Macbook, the home PC and my iPhone.
I like to have a solid backup of my vault. Sync provides this to a degree, but not at the “restore a whole folder” level and on my first pass of using Sync I would make sure to have Obsidian open on a Windows PC at home that I knew to be backed up nightly.
For a time I used iCloud instead. It had the benefit of automatically downloading a copy to PC for backup, but it’s simply not possible to safely have Obsidian running. The constant saving of file changes was too fast for iCloud to manage and multiple versions of a file would result. iCloud was also causing memory and CPU problems on my device.
So, as of September 2023, back to Obsidian sync. I’ve solved the backup problem by finally finding software that can reliably backup my Mac to the Synology DiskStation DS920+ NAS.
Useful resources
- Obsidian Publish
- Practically Paperless with Obsidian, Episode 1: The Basics: Notes and Documents – Jamie Todd Rubin - a long series of articles best tackled once you have some experience with the software.
- Development roadmap
- Obsidian Markdown syntax
- Obsidian CSS snippets
- Is there a way to change the color of the nodes in graph view? - Help - Obsidian Forum
- Customize Obsidian Publish with CSS - by Eric Gregorich (substack.com) -hide folders and backlinks on a page
- Use callouts - Obsidian Help
Plugins
Styling
GitHub - efemkay/obsidian-modular-css-layout: CSS Layout hack for Obsidian.md gives wide and multi-columns.