Blog Setup

High-Level Setup

• This blog uses the Hugo static site generator with the hugo-theme-minima theme.
• I host this blog on GitHub Pages under richkuz.github.io/blog
• richkuz.net has a CNAME record pointing www at richkuz.github.io.
• I write posts in Obsidian in markdown format
• I push Obsidian markdown files into my [https://github.com/richkuz/blog](GitHub blog repo) using my github-push-folder Obsidian plug-in

Why Hugo over Jekyll?

I like al-folio on Jekyll, but Hugo has faster build times and there’s less to install. Jesse Wei’s blog post about switching from Hugo with PaperMod to Jekyll almost made me reconsider. But Hugo has momentum, I expect it will improve over time, and gain more mind share. Both systems use markdown, so this feels like a two-way-door decision. It should be easy enough to migrate to another system if needed.

Other Obsidian plugins evaluated

• Obsidian Git Plugin - This might work, but it’s overkill for my needs and might not work well on Android. Also it performs two-way sync and I only want one-way sync because I use the official Obsidian Sync to keep my files synced across devices.
• Vault to blog Plugin - This might work too, but it looked slightly more restrictive than what I needed.
• Remotely Save Plugin - I started with this approach, using it to backup my vault to an AWS S3 folder. But there were several issues:
  • I didn’t want two-way syncing, only one-way syncing.
  • I set the Sync Direction to “Incremental Push And Delete”, but it didn’t reliably delete from S3
  • I didn’t want to maintain the added complexity of an IAM role to write to the S3 bucket, plus a GitHub action to periodically poll from S3 with another IAM read role just to update a content folder.