According to the count in my archives, I've published over 50 blog posts in the past few weeks. That's about as many as I've managed to publish in the past 10 years!

Granted, they're small posts and none of them are masterworks. But, like I wrote earlier, I'm hoping to land a few moderately decent things instead of waiting until I come up with something great.

So, I figured I might write something about the assemblage of parts I've accumulated over time that added up to this low-friction writing system I have now.

Obsidian

I use Obsidian as a daybook, for taking notes and writing in general. One Markdown file per day, created every morning from a template, named for the current date in a folder for the current year.

In that file, I accumulate notions and tasks over the course of a day. Occasionally, something buds off into a linked page devoted to the topic - a project, a person, a train of thought. Sometimes I use tags to index bullet points on themes I might want to collect & review later.

Beyond all of that, I don't use many of the fancier features of Obsidian. There are a few things I do by hand for which I keep meaning to write a plugin or some scripts - but it's been about six years of never quite getting around to it.

Syncthing

I don't use Obsidian Sync, though it would probably make my life easier if I did. Instead, I use Syncthing - that works well enough since my Obsidian notes are really just a pile of files.

Like Obsidian, there are builds of Syncthing for every desktop & laptop OS. It also works on my Synology NAS for backups. When I had an Android phone, I used a version of Syncthing that ran great. Now that I have an iPhone, I use a version of Syncthing that works as well as it can within the limitations of iOS.

This means that I can edit notes on one of about 7 redundant copies across devices - the changes land everywhere eventually. There are conflicts sometimes, but they're manageable. Periodically, the Synology NAS commits changes to a remote git repository, and the files get included in a big offsite cloud backup.

For what it's worth, at one point I tried using iCloud Drive to sync notes between my iPhone and a MacBook Pro. That worked so horribly that I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Easy-Blog Oven

I’ve written about it before, but I built my own static site generator for this blog. I call it my Easy-Blog Oven. It mostly follows the convention I picked up from Jekyll years ago - i.e. one Markdown file per post, named for the date and a URL path slug.

But, one thing I've learned is that friction adds up in user interfaces. It can be a squelch threshold that filters out noise that might be worth considering signal. Creating new files worked well enough when I was trying to hold back until I had Big Things to write. But, that was enough of a drag to keep me from posting much at all.

My use of Obsidian as a private daybook got me thinking, though: I used to write that way in public using Dave Winer's OPML Editor. One file per day as an idea accumulator. Why couldn't I do that with my own system now?

The tweak that seemed to unlock it for me was the addition of a multipart separator to the post format, so I could edit one file per day with multiple blog posts. The file starts with one daily post of miscellaneous ideas, some of which can develop into separate posts without leaving that file.

So, my daily habit now is this: on the left side in my Obsidian window is my private daybook, while on the right side is my public daybook.