It might be love...

It's been a very long time since I've posted on my blog. There are many reasons, but the largest blocker was support for OpenLiveWriter disappeared abruptly. OpenLiveWriter was one of the only tools that supported my blog platform.

I played with other tools.

OneNote is kinda garbage as a blogging tool, because storing my notes in rich text meant I had to spend a lot of time reformatting the content when I wanted to publish it. I also found that once I started writing something I could never remember where I put it.

Notepad++ was years ahead of everyone else by introducing a feature that didn't require that you actually save your files. This was my authoring tool of choice for markdown files, but without the publishing capabilities, I might as well be using blogspot's online editor.

Typora is a gorgeous interface that let's you write in Markdown (my preferred way of getting thoughts into digital form), but the tool lacked external integrations. I was motivated to create my own PowerShell library for publishing markdown files to blogger, which worked but was very clunky.

Last week, I started with Obsidian and it's a game changer. I'm in love.

Obsidian isn't a blogging tool. It's a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) tool that stores its data in markdown files. As a PKM, it's all about "linking your thinking": creating small notes with connections to other notes. This interconnectedness between notes creates a web of knowledge with easy retrieval, and Obsidian has this magical indexing feature that doesn't just index the content, but the meta data about the content itself: YAML front-matter, todo items, incoming and outgoing links between pages. There's also a wealth of community plugins that allow you to write dynamic JavaScript code-blocks to query and display the content. Each note is an object, so I'm not just taking notes, I'm capturing thoughts while using the tool as a Journaling / CRM / Task tracker. Every day, I have new ideas on how to use the tool differently.

Today, I discovered that there's a community plugin for publishing directly from Obsidian to my blog platform. Hello!

In the past, my blog has always been a mechanism of sharing knowledge with others, but it's also been a place to store things that I want to remember. The intersection between PKM and my blog has always been there, but now there's no separation between the idea and the tool.