Tag: Obsidian

Two things: Site change and Obsidian

Lynn

First, I’m about to start a major rebuilding project related to this site. I will be getting it off WordPress and returning it to a static HTML site. This is because, well, reasons. They’re many and varied.

A couple of them (possibly not the most important) are: security, server resources, comment spam, comments in general, control, I have finally discovered scripting and have created my own little templating system that means I can package a 3000+ page site in seconds and just use Filezilla to upload it.

Comment spam is a pain in the ass but tolerable. I don’t like it but I honestly hardly notice it because all comments are moderated. I delete them every few weeks and that’s that.

So really it comes down to I’m doing it just because I want to. And because as AI becomes more and more capable, WordPress and other dynamic web content becomes less and less secure. I’m not worried about it; I just don’t want to deal with it (if it happens)!

But I accidentally on purpose built a static site setup that is nearly effortless and will let me have absolute control over every page on my site. If I want a page with fourteen columns, I could make it. WordPress might let me, but I’d have to learn block coding and design, and I’m just…tired.

I’m tired of WordPress. I’m tired of SEO (I never use it anyway but still). I’m tired of the web being the way it is now.

I decided a while back, when I realized I really needed to update an older WordPress theme I use on a different site, that I also really needed to learn the WordPress block editor and full site editing, specifically if I want to update that site layout, and I realized I just don’t want to learn it. Just don’t want to.

WordPress is not the blogging platform it used to be. It still runs blogs just fine, but most blogs aren’t really blogs anymore. They’re businesses pretending to be blogs. So I guess WordPress knew where things were heading and adapted accordingly. It is a full fledged CMS and it hasn’t been user friendly for an amateur web developer in a long time.

If you haven’t stayed up to date with every change, getting up to date in one fell swoop feels impossible.

Back in the day, I learned the things I needed to learn to build a theme from scratch in a few days. Now, I’m certain it would take me weeks. If not longer.

I’m just not up for it.

Second—

Ah crap.

I already forgot the second. I shouldn’t have gotten distracted by the WordPress thing.

Let me think.

Oh yeah! Obsidian.

I’ve changed my mind. I started using Obsidian again more heavily a few weeks ago, and this time something must have clicked (or my use cases were just way more suited to it) because I have completely changed my mind about it.

I really couldn’t tell you the difference this time, but I have been discovering some formatting and other options (callouts, extract, outline, code blocks) that make it feel at least as formatted as something I paste into OneNote and more useful by a long shot. In fact, I’ve moved things out of OneNote and I don’t miss it at all.

What really changed things for me was the discovery that I could code little custom scripts for myself using AI (for things I had never gotten around to learning to code before), and I’ve been learning some myself through examples, asking for thorough explanation, and experimenting. I now have a solution to the sync issues. I use a little script on my computer to move files from my Obsidian uploads folder in OneDrive and into Obsidian on my laptop.

It’s not “sync” but it’s darn close to it.

I do have to upload any file I create in Obsidian on my phone to OneDrive. But it creates a kind of built in version control because OneDrive refuses to overwrite files with the same name when I upload something.

I’ve found that for my own workflow, I’m giving up almost nothing to have total control over my documents and all of them in a format that is safe for a long-term archive.

I’m in the middle of coding a custom script set that will turn my raw LibreOffice Writer .odt files into upload ready PDF print books. It’s been a whirlwind of learning and coding that will depend on no service to do.

So I better get back to it. Only a few scenes today to finish writing first. Which brings me to another topic but I’ll save it for another day.

A little hint: I’ve discovered that I’ve been working against my own abilities as a writer, and the discovery has kind of been the answer to everything painful and hard about writing.

Me, Obsidian, and 144 notes later…I quit!

Lynn

I had forgotten how trying it can be to trial new software in an established system. Obsidian was the trial and the system is my note-taking and journaling processes. Those processes are the product of a lot of previous experimentation and habit.

You can see my Obsidian journey here:

Obsidian wasn’t bad. It just isn’t for me. It keeps your notes in markdown files, which I love the idea of, but the execution of, not so much. Markdown files are full of formatting syntax (lots of * and _ and [ and the like) that can make a pure text file look messy.

Continue reading “Me, Obsidian, and 144 notes later…I quit!” →

Gemini’s ASCII Poop Story

Lynn

The following is a story generated by AI. I changed not a word of it. It does include some phrases that I wrote in the conversation I was having with it before I requested the story, but for the most part, it’s a creative exercise of the AI, not me. :D

Enjoy, or not! But don’t say you weren’t warned.

Don’t complain to me if you hate it, or hate AI generated images and text, and don’t give me a talking to because you have an anti-AI bias. I don’t care. I will delete your comments.

(I have my own anti-AI bias that’s slowly given way to the fun I keep having with it. I don’t need your complaining, thanks very much.)

But if you want to talk about AI generated writing in a reasonable way that isn’t pooping on my internet home? Yes, please.

Continue reading “Gemini’s ASCII Poop Story” →

Second (and third) thoughts on Obsidian

Lynn

I was going to stop using Obsidian today.

But…

Yesterday I discovered how to use the text editing tool in Gboard. It seems to make selections in Obsidian much easier than using my finger. So that solved at least a bit of that problem.

And today, I solved my share to OneNote problem by activating the OneNote floatie. I tested it I’m making some notes, and while making those notes, I decided to use both apps because I still wasn’t feeling 100% ready to abandon Obsidian.

But I discovered while doing all this sharing and copy pasting articles, using the finger press instead of the Gboard clipboard (which is less likely to strip out formatting), that OneNote doesn’t keep links that are in the text, but Obsidian does. Which is quite handy.

And last night I discovered that embedding audio files in Obsidian places a playback tool right in the Obsidian note. OneNote does do something similar with the attachment in the note, but the player is nowhere near as attractive.

That seems like such a small thing but I was looking at that and thinking I really want to keep Obsidian just based on appearances. It’s not a good reason to choose one piece of software over another one. However, even though Obsidian is boring and gray and low contrast in light mode in some ways, at least I can get a white background behind my folder view?) (Custom CSS snippets.)

So here I am tonight seriously considering sticking with Obsidian despite what I consider to be significant drawbacks and only a few true advantages. Admittedly, a couple of those advantages really play right into the things that I like, but those drawbacks are significant.

But I don’t know, I kind of think I’m going to stick with Obsidian after all.

Obsidian is great, but is it for me?

Lynn

I want to love Obsidian, but as you can guess, any comment that starts with that kind of phrase is going to be a comment saying but…

I do love writing fiction in it.

I don’t love it for my notes in general.

It’s not nearly as easy to skim as my Writer documents, and it’s not as easy to paste into, copy from, or otherwise capture or organize notes as it is in OneNote. Some of that might be my incomplete set up. It seemed like the best move to make folders and subfolders as I go for organization, and not getting ahead of myself (especially since I wasn’t planning to get in a hurry to port over my notes from OneNote), but that means I’m making a lot of decisions every time I make a new note that doesn’t fit into the current setup. That’s a lot of little choke points.

Also, the interlinking isn’t really as great as I thought it would be. Only the embedding is truly awesome. Embedding other notes’ content in a note is really easy and really cool.

However, I made a new note and embedded some content into it from some other notes, with the plan to copy out the resulting text as a whole, but copying from the Reading View was finicky even on the computer (selecting text is very finicky on my Android phone from the Obsidian app). It did end up working the way I wanted, and I can see it working really well if I design my files in a certain way to make it work better, but for what I used it for, I could have copied and pasted the text from the other files faster, and I’d have ended up with an unchanging copy of what I used. To get that now, I’d have to copy from Reading View and paste it into another new note.

So, no, now that I’m thinking of it, the time spent wasn’t worth it in the set up of the new note at all, and if I change any of the text in the original files (which has huge benefits in some cases), I’ll have no way of confirming what was actually in the second file, because it will update, too (which is a negative in this case). Meaning embed isn’t as big a benefit as it seems on the surface after all.

I really need to decide if I’m ready to give up and go back to OneNote, or if I need to commit to going all in and quickly with Obsidian so I can get over these growing pains and learn to deal with the limitations and make the benefits actually work for me.

Because other than having md files I can move around, they really aren’t yet.