How I created the site for my Obsidian vault

This site is created using very simple script that transforms notes with certain parameters defined in build.py into ready-to-publish notes. The site itself is quite simple in usage, it uses hugo with a slightly modified hugo-PaperMod theme that just uses the transformed Markdown files into HTML.

build.py performs a simple regular expression to find publish: true inside my Notes/ directory:

HOME = Path.home()
VAULT = HOME / "notes"
NOTES = VAULT / "Notes"
DEST = VAULT / "site" / "content" / "notes"

for filepath in NOTES.rglob("*.md"):
    process_file(filepath)

def process_file(filepath):
    # ...
    frontmatter = re.sub(
        r"^publish:\s*true\s*\n?", "", frontmatter, flags=re.MULTILINE
    )
    # ...

The script will essentially grab all the Markdown files in NOTES and search for those that have publish: true in their frontmatter and perform some basic modifications like removing unwanted properties or transforming by references into their source URLs.

After the script runs through all the files inside my vault I have a site directory where I manage everything related to what you are seeing right now: the build script, public/ files with what hugo build produces, and the basic structure of a hugo site (static/, assets/, themes/).

You can find the public files in the repository I have available at GitHub: vault.

In short this is what I do:

./build.py
hugo build
git add . && git commit && git push
rsync <...>

But to avoid doing this every time I have all those steps inside a Makefile that allows me to simply do:

make publish

Now all I have to do is to sit down, write a note I know will become publicly available and do <C-t and select my blog template:

---
publish: true
---

This is all I need. I could of course make it more sophisticated; I’ve seen some mental gardens that even show the famous Obsidian graph view, but all I want is some simple way to put my thoughts on the internet, and this does it for me.