2024-08-10 New hosting
In a poor and obviously failing attempt to simplify things, I'm testing using a different method to publish and host this site.
I have been using Obsidian Publish for a few years now, and because I was an early adopter I am grandfathered in to a lower annual cost.
The pros of using it are:
- Simple. It is built into the Obsidian core and Just Works.
- Well supported. See above.
The cons:
- No support for Dataview.
That con is where the desire to simplify is coming from. I have been running some hacky Javascript to convert Dataview queries into static note pages, but they tend to misbehave. The latest problem is that, for reasons I cannot fathom, running the scripts pastes some content into the note that is currently open. It's an easy fix - just delete that text. But it's tiresome, and I don't want to spend any more time maintaining this.
Almost since Obsidian came into existence, there have been plugins that help you to create static sites using Hugo, Hexo, Astro, and more. One problem with most of them has been that you now have to deal with git, and managing a publishing toolchain, and so on. Lots more complexity.
Whilst looking at options today I found the Obsidian Digital Garden (ODG) plugin, and it is spot on. Set up was quick and easy, and the plugin deals with Git, which triggers a rebuild on Vercel, which makes the site available.
I did have one problem though - Dependabot insisted on bumping the version of the Eleventy RSS plugin that is used by ODG. This caused breakage. Fortunately there is a PR in the ODG repo that shows how to tell Dependabot to leave this alone. Once I had applied the same change, all was good with the world.
So far so good. I think I'll make this a permanent move once I've tweaked a couple of things, like making some navigation available on the published site.
Update: The move is done. As always with these things, DNS will take a while to update everywhere, but once it has this site will be running on Vercel.