Public Second Brain with Quartz

Last updated Jan 13, 2025

This is my documentation of how I publish my notes from a private Obsidian vault to my Public Second Brain with open-source Quartz and GoHugo.

I had several iterations. I used to have an HTML/CSS/PHP website, moved to a traditional blog with WordPress, and now have a Static Site Generators (SSG)-blog with GoHugo and a Second Brain (where you read this note) with GoHugo/Quartz.

On this page, I elaborate on how I can simply write in my Obsidian Vault, add #publish anywhere in my note, and run make deploy and it’s published on my public brain. No conversion, no extra formatting, no nothing needed, just running a make file.

I can write offline, on my mobile phone, or wherever I want; Obsidian will sync it across. Publishing will happen on my laptop (running the make deploy, which essentially does a rsync to my web hosting).

How do I publish? There are two steps.

1. I added a Python script find-publish-notes.py to the Makefile to copy all my SecondBrain notes from my Obsidian Vault with the hashtag #publish and copy it into the Quartz git-repo.
   1. Since 2023-06-07: I switched to a Rust-script that does the same but adds #hashtags properly as Hugo requests, and it is 30x faster. To get the Rust executable, you need to run cargo build --release from within the utils/obsidian-quartz folder.
2. I ran the make deploy that syncs the changes to my website. This command copies notes with the hashtag “publish” and deploys to brain.ssp.sh. See also more in below .
   1. Since I use GitHub, I could also create a GitHub Action to deploy on commit. But I actually prefer to run the make file.

Quartz v3 Workaround

I copy all my Zettels in the root folder instead of adding sub-folders in Quartz. This way I can use Wikilinks [[]] and do not need to change to absolute paths - which I do not want to activate in my Second Brain.

Here I describe how I deploy my second brain.

I self-host on my own server as I already have hosting for my website. The only thing I do I rsync the public-folder to my web hosting, that’s all. The script shows how I do it. The actual line is rsync -avz --delete public/ USER@DOMAIN.com:~/www/brain (just replace with your user and domain).

If you do want to use GitHub actions, you can check the Data Glossary (glossary.airbyte.com) which is the same setup as Quartz, but there we use GitHub. Checkout the required deploy.yaml that makes the magic work

Basically, when someone changes the branch hugo, it will deploy changes to master branch and publish that. I think I wrote some more details here.

I added the option to overwrite the header image, and its width and height for each note, as well as the description. E.g. in the Frontmatter I can now overwrite the terms with:

1
2
3
4
5
6

---
ogimage: de-vault.jpg
ogwidth: 1024
ogheight: 761
ogdescription: this is my new description
---

Link: My Obsidian Note-Taking Workflow - YouTube

Other Public Second Brains

Origin:
References: GoHugo Static Site Generators (SSG) Shared on SH: Hackernews
Created 2022-08-20