According to the count in my archives, I've published over 50 blog posts in the past few weeks. That's roughly 50 more than I managed in the previous 10 years!

These aren't masterpieces—mostly just random thoughts and half-baked ideas. But as I mentioned before, I'd rather throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks than spend another decade crafting the perfect post that never gets published.

So, here's how I tinkered my way into a writing setup that seems to actually be working.

Obsidian daybook

I use Obsidian as a daybook (or Commonplace book)—one Markdown file per day, created fresh each morning from a template, named something like "2025-06-02.md" and stuffed into a folder for the year.

All day long, I just brain dump into this file—random thoughts, to-do items, complaints about software, whatever. Sometimes an idea gets interesting enough to spawn its own page. Sometimes I throw tags around to pretend I'm organized. Mostly it's just a place where thoughts go to live and accumulate over the year.

I've been meaning to write some fancy plugins for Obsidian for about six years now. Spoiler alert: I haven't. Turns out the simple stuff works fine, and complicated systems are just more things to break.

Syncthing

I could use Obsidian Sync, and it would probably make my life easier. But I'm masochistic and cheap, so I use Syncthing instead. My notes are just files sitting in folders—why overcomplicate it?

Syncthing runs on everything I own: my laptop, my phone, my NAS, probably my wifi-connected oven if I tried hard enough. When I edit something on one device, it eventually shows up everywhere else. Sometimes there are conflicts, but they're manageable.

My Synology NAS backs everything up to git and then to the cloud, because I'm paranoid about losing six years of random thoughts. (Also, trying to sync notes with iCloud Drive nearly drove me to therapy, so don't do that.)

Easy-Blog Oven

A while back, I built my own static site generator. I called it my Easy-Blog Oven because naming things is hard and I thought that matched the gravitas of the endeavor. It takes Markdown files and turns them into a website, mostly following the Jekyll convention of putting dates in filenames.

The system worked fine when I was trying to write Important Blog Posts. But creating a new file every time I wanted to say something turned out to be just enough friction to make me not say anything at all. Laziness is stronger than creativity.

Daybook blogging

Here's where things got interesting. I was already using Obsidian as a private daybook, just dumping thoughts into one file per day. Then I remembered doing something similar years ago with Dave Winer's OPML Editor—one file per day as an idea accumulator, but in public.

Why not bring that daybook approach to the blog?

The magic trick was adding separators so I could put multiple blog posts in a single daily file. Now I start each day with one rambling post full of random thoughts. Some of those thoughts graduate to become their own posts, without me having to do anything fancy ahead of time like "create a new file" or "think of a title before I start writing."

It's not perfect and it breaks easily—in fact, this post was in several broken stages today—but it's a hack-in-progress that (mostly) works for now.

Putting it all together

So here's my daily routine: Obsidian open on my laptop, split screen. Private daybook on the left, public daybook on the right. Each morning I create both daily files from templates, because I like consistency even if everything else is chaos.

Throughout the day, I move ideas between private and public as the mood strikes. I can wander off to get coffee and keep writing on my phone. Syncthing makes sure everything ends up everywhere, including my always-on NAS.

Since my NAS was already committing my private notes to git (because paranoia), it wasn't hard to make it commit my public notes to a different repository on GitHub. From there, a GitHub Action rebuilds my blog and uploads it to Amazon S3. This process executes every 10 minutes and takes 1 minute to run, so it's a pretty nimble mess.

And all of this, because apparently I enjoy building Rube Goldberg machines in my spare time.

Why This Rube Goldberg Machine Actually Works

This contraption works because it removes all the stupid little decisions that used to stop me from writing. No "should I write a post about this?" moments. No staring at blank "New Post" screens. No futzing over titles before I've even figured out what I want to say.

Ideas just start as notes and become posts when they feel like it. There's no ceremony, no artificial distinction between "real writing" and "just thinking out loud."

The whole thing is built on stuff I was already doing anyway—taking notes, backing things up, procrastinating on important work. The publishing just happens as a side effect, which is honestly the only way I was ever going to publish anything consistently.

Sometimes the best system is the one that's too lazy to get in your way.