Back to Jekyll

I tried the whole “everything in one place” note-taking experiment for a while. Obsidian, second brain, Zettelkasten, whatever you want to call it. There are plenty of nerds on the internet who will tell you it’s the answer to all your problems if you just get enough plugins and hotkeys sorted out. I bought in for a bit.

It didn’t do much for me. At least, not in the way people seem to promise.

For meeting notes, Agenda.app works better. I don’t need to explain it—calendar, notes, decent search, and it’s designed for meetings, not for people who want to build a private wiki about their lives.

Obsidian is fine for longer stuff or project notes. But dumping everything in there just made a mess. Instead of having lots of places to lose track of things, I just had one big one. The “second brain” just became a bigger, dumber version of the first.

Obsidian Publish was supposed to make it easy to share some notes online, but it turns out I barely remembered it existed most of the time. It costs more than it should, can’t really handle multiple domains, and you don’t get much control over how things are published. If you’re used to tweaking your own static site, it feels like going backwards.

The other problem, and this is one I don’t see talked about much, is that all the content I had on Obsidian Publish made for a terrible blog. It wasn’t structured as posts. Formatting was all over the place. Most of it was unfinished, or personal, or just not something anyone else should ever see. If I want to bring anything over to Jekyll, it’s going to be a project. I’ll have to pick through, see if anything’s worth saving, and clean it up before it even resembles a blog post. Most of it probably won’t make the cut.

So, back to Jekyll. I write in Markdown, I push to GitHub, and the site updates. I point whatever domains I want at it, set things up how I like, and don’t have to think about monthly subscriptions or if some new app is about to break my workflow. It’s not magic, but it works, and it’s not pretending to be anything more than a pile of text files and some templates.

I’m sure I’ll get annoyed with this setup eventually and try something else. But for now, this is good enough.