How I Over-Engineered This Public Notes Instead of Paying $10

Feb 22, 2025

How I Over-Engineered My Public Notes Instead of Paying $10

Am I too late to the blogging scene? Probably, yes. Who reads blogs these days, huh? I do, and probably a very small set of people like me do. And mostly, this is for me, not really for others. And i wouldn't really call this a blog, its more like taking notes in public. Thought it'd be kind of fun to learn in public. And this is the first such session, me trying to setup the perfect free blogging setup instead of paying 10$ for a service which would have done the job much better than me.

A Quest for not paying

Today, I took the time to set up my blogging workflow. I already use Obsidian a lot for note-taking and journaling, so I searched for ways to publish Obsidian notes as blogs. There's a nice paid tool called Obsidian Publish, Me being me, of course, I'd spend hours of engineering effort to create something instead of paying 10 bucks for it. And I did exactly that.

I found this nice tool called Quartz, a static site generator built with Obsidian in mind. Jumped into the docs and set it up.

The Struggles

Now, I faced a few problems.

Syncing Notes Like a True Techie I use obsidian-git to sync my notes across multiple devices. Also, because I don't want to pay for Obsidian Sync (which, to be fair, would have been a much better UX).
Keeping Secrets, Sharing Thoughts To publish my blogs, I needed Quartz to track only the notes I wanted to go public. This wasn't very straightforward. What I ended up doing was creating a git subtree called Public and using Quartz there.
GitHub Pages Said "Nope" GitHub won't let you use GitHub Pages for free with private repos. So I had to write a GitHub Actions workflow to copy over the build folder generated by Quartz to a new public repo and push it there each time I make a change in my Obsidian repo (which contains all my private notes, hence why I can't just make it public).

After hours... I managed to get it working. (If you're reading this, then yeah, it's working.)

I Did It!

It was fun... kinda. It's been a while since I've been able to spend time on stuff like this, and I'm glad I did. I'm going to start writing more here—more public notes. I don't care if anyone reads them or not. Just knowing that someone might and that they might find it useful is enough. But also, it feels strangely satisfying to just put my thoughts out there on the open web, accessible to anyone.

Now, I kinda want to revamp my personal website and add more stuff there, but I only have so much time. I'll leave it for another day.