Kev's Second 🧠

    Improvements to Cheap Publish

    Posted February 12, 2023, last updated December 20, 2023  ‐  5 min read

    I started using Obsidian in early 2023 and loved it right away. I then contemplated the idea of publishing online. I had a blog in the past but it felt different. Obsidian felt like that was it.

    I took a look at the official Publish service from Obsidian but as a fellow Home Lab-er, there is no way I'd pay to host a personal website. I'd rather spend countless hours hacking something.

    I started searching online for an "Obsidian Publish open source alternative" and found quite a few:

    • MindStone: free open-source alternative solution to Obsidian Publish
    • pubsidian: An Obsidian-Publish alternative but it's FREE
    • TuanManhCao/digital-garden : Free Obisidian Publish alternative, for publishing your digital garden.
    • Markbase: Easily sync and publish your docs, notes, and digital gardens
    • Quartz: Host your second brain and digital garden for free (based on Hugo)
    • binnyva/gatsby-garden: A Digital Garden Theme for Gatsby. Gatsby Garden lets you create a static HTML version of your markdown notes
    • Obsidian to Github: Create and edit a Jekyll website in Obsidian. Publish to Github without friction.
    • ppeetteerrs/obsidian-zola: A no-brainer solution to turning your Obsidian PKM into a Zola site.

    None of them are perfect. The official Publish service isn't perfect neither.

    obsidian-zola was my favorite. It seemed simple enough, yet packed with features. I decided to give it a go. I had a few issues/bugs and noticed there wasn't much recent activity on the repo, so I started looking at the Network graph to see which forks seemed active.

    I lent on Yarden-zamir/obsidian-zola-plus, which adds a preview pop-up from another fork, giscus comments (which I didn't know was a thing), etc.

    I started using it and quickly noticed a few bugs. Enough to bother me. However, this time, I decided to create my own fork and start there, because why not. I'm now calling it Cheap Publish, 'cause my mom raised me an honest man.

    So what did I change?

    More flexible frontmatter (now called Properties)

    I added the following frontmatter keys:

    • title: allows to override the page's title without changing the filename
    • created: shows the date the page was initially created, eg: Posted February 13, 2023
    • modified: when present and modified != created, shows both dates, eg: Posted February 1, 2023, last updated February 5, 2023

    While working in that section, I re-enabled the read time:

    Test|400

    Extra

    I'm also passing down to zola/templates/content/page.html any extra frontmatter keys. Useful to customize the template based on that.

    Ability to bypass the landing page

    I didn't read much about it, but Zola treats the homepage as a "special page". I just wanted a regular page from my note.

    This is now possible. I'm not 100% sure the landing page still works to be perfectly honest with you, so if you try my fork and keep the landing page, please let me know 😬.

    To bypass the landing page, set REDIRECT_HOME in your netlify.toml to the path you want to redirect to, e.g. REDIRECT_HOME = "README". It simply sets the main section's redirect_to setting to whatever you put in there. Zola doc here.

    Resize images

    That one was bothering me a lot since it's supported natively in Obsidian.

    Example of this above image resized to 100 pixels wide:

    ![Engelbart|100](https://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Basis/images/Engelbart.jpg)
or
![100](https://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Basis/images/Engelbart.jpg)

    Engelbart|100 or 100

    Note that this is done dynamically in JavaScript because I was lazy, and it only supports the syntax above.

    A few fixes/changes

    • The sidebar no longer reload the whole page when clicking a link / anchor
    • The graph no longer jumps on the first hover. It's also prettier with a little wiggling animation on load 😻.
    • Removed mandatory /docs from every URLs, now directly served at /
    • Removed frontmatter=never from local-run.sh (why!?)
    • Fixed the URL detection for previews using the host (might not be a solution for all)
    • Updated obsidian-export to its latest version
    • Allowed . in filename, e.g. 1. Start here, 2. Once Upon A Time, etc. Useful for the sidebar since it's sorted by name.
    • Better blockquote style
    • Remove (commented-out) single dollar sign $ from LaTeX/katex's renderMathInElement

    "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
    - Thomas Edison

    TODO

    • Write a proper README with instruction on how to use
    • Write some doc about the changes I made to the comment layout (I use Remark42) and/or remove the comment configs and let it up to the user to decide / figure out what they want
    • Fix the graph when URL contains a # (current node doesn't seem set)
    • Identify external link
    • Open external link in new window

    Wish list

    Share your thoughts