Last updated on 13/10/2026
Ok, so, I’m not exactly in the habit of promoting individual products here. Sometimes I’ll do a review of a TTRPG system or a solo game, but that’s about the limit of it. This article, or the article that’s coming as you read the paragraph in this moment, is a little bit pitching a toolchain and a little bit pointing at a thing that’s fun to do.
I don’t think I’ve been coy over the years that I love obsidian. It’s a fine product. Free as in beer, runs on any device I have, decent at organizing my thoughts using a light markup syntax, and with a rich, rich plugin ecosystem. Obsidian is useful enough that it finally broke me free of my “emacs is my operating system” chains, which isn’t exactly faint praise if you know me.
The curious reader may want to know if I also use foot pedals. I regret to inform you that knowledge costs extra 😉
I use obsidian (and a handful of plugins) heavily. It’s really useful for the following tasks:
- Playing TTRPGs
- Running my research agenda
- Writing Fiction, including publishing novels
- Writing Non-Fiction
- Managing employees and mentees
Honestly, all of those things share a common core. I need to capture my thoughts, I do that best in text, but I want it to be text that I can search through and read at a glance. There’s some nice lightweight syntax [[]] for associating documents, and obsidian does a good job at guessing which documents I’m trying to recall when I start typing words. It can associate text with rich media, which is a requirement more than a nice bonus, and it’s relatively trivial to integrate the content of an obsidian vault with other systems. Or, at least that’s my opinion because as a software developer and author and my whole life revolves around doing unnatural things to text files. If you are also some form of {arcane | eldritch} text pervert, obsidian will do you right. Highly recommend.
Also though, it’s not the thing I wanted to push in this post. That last bullet point in the common core, easy extraction, is huge. Information is really only as useful as it is consumable. Beyond an audience of one, which I mean, I think I’m pretty important and I’m sure you think that of yourself as well, but if you need to disseminate information, then sharing it effectively becomes really, really important. And quartz makes that stump fucking simple for obsidian vaults.
Before I go into how it works, two things to point out. First, you can also just pay the obsidian developers for a way to publish your vaults. It’ll save you a little (or a huge) setup cost and you’ll be supporting the development of a pretty sweet product. That said, if you’re familiar with git and don’t mind using github, quartz is a shockingly effective tool for moving a pile of markdown documents to the web as a static webpage. It’s also the easier route if you want your content hosted at a custom URL and you already own some domains. It is as simple as:
- Fork the quartz repo
- Set your repo to publish a github pages page on push
- Link, copy, or otherwise move your vault into its
contentfolder - Push commit and push changes to your vault
In my mind, step 4 there is already a best-practices thing. Data loss is some bullshit, and it’s some bullshit that can be cheaply avoided if you are willing to put in a little bit of extra work. Markdown is like 99% text anyway, so most vaults aren’t huge, or at least the ones I work with aren’t.
Anyway, for my obsidian workflow (which I think you should adopt if you aren’t backing up your work with git), it’s basically a small setup cost to have any set of docs I’m working on publicly viewable. “Why would you want that?”, I hear you cry, you convenient rhetorical device you.
Well, because I work with other researchers and having them be able to see the state of my current research thinking is quite cool. Or because I’m running a tabletop game for multiple players and I find Foundry to be a little heavy weight for most games, or because I’m producing a serialization of a solo game I’m working on (or at least toying around with the idea). There are a bunch of reasons you might want that.
The overarching one is selfish though, at least for me. Hitting foo.bar.blah and seeing things I wrote tickles something primal in the brain. It is the source of considerable amounts of dopamine, and if it is also a little bit convenient to my colleagues, my players, or people that want to read my stories, then that’s a nice bonus.
Is this where we do call to actions? I suppose that’s the format, right? Seriously, if this is a thing that interests you, you owe it to yourself to take for a spin over some lunch hour. Maybe it’ll help.