Obsidian as a content management system

I’ve been meaning to set up a new website for my writing for a long time, because Substack has become way too pushy – it’s great for building an audience, but not so great for just sharing writing.

Having my own site allows me to use the web more fully, like properly embedding code snippets or full-blown interactive custom elements, which Substack will never be able to offer by virtue of being a platform.

Equally, I want to be able to write when inspiration strikes, and then do so in a convenient and familiar interface.

Luckily we now live in such amazing times that “build me a bespoke Obsidian plugin to deploy content to my bespoke website” is a reasonable thing to ask a project for an evening, not a whole month.

How it works

I had the agent add a publishing API to my website, using a pre-shared secret (because pre-sharing a secret with myself is easy).

Then, I summoned an Obsidian plugin into existence which uses that API to import and publish content.

Ultimately, the website and all its content is stored as a private GitHub repository. The API server itself is running on an exe.dev VM – excellent service, highly recommend it even if you are not super technical because they went to great lengths to make agents feel at home.

Since Obsidian plugins themselves are just code, they can be stored in your Obsidian vault, and as long as they don’t use platform-specific features, a plugin written on your laptop will also run on your phone.

Why Obsidian

Beyond the obvious “because I am using it already”: it’s a great basic shell/content environment because it has all of the components I’d expect from an environment, like sync, a Command Palette, and a plugin ecosystem.