One of the things that was really important to me was maintaining the ability to post to Popone from more or less anywhere. For the last year or so I’ve been using Obsidian with a Wordpress plugin to post; with the move to Hugo I needed to work out something new. I think I’ve got it now.
The source of truth for posts is a private GitHub repository. In theory I could write the posts in GitHub’s web interface but that feels sloppy to me and it’s not a great mobile experience. What’s the point of using modular components if I just lock into yet another proprietary solution? The quest continued.
First step: install the iOS Git client Working Copy. Free for basic features, although I’m gonna wind up using pro features, on which more later. But now I have an easy sync to iOS, and my Git repo is local! I could use the Working Copy editor… nah, let’s keep pushing, I really like Obsidian.
Second step: let’s split off the content directory for my blog from the big old repo full of images and conversion scripts. This is not a full technical post but suffice it to say it wasn’t too hard; I just moved the content to a new repo, set it up as a submodule of the primary repo, and edited the GitHub actions a bit to make sure we fetch the current submodule before building. That works. I need to do a little more work to make it build whenever I merge to main in the content repo, but I know how to trigger actions in the primary repo so that’s a simple matter of programming. Yeah, I just did that, now it’s all automatic.
At this point I can sync the smaller, manageable content repo down to Working Copy. Cool. Now, Obsidian allows you to specify the location of a vault and Working Copy makes its repos available as part of the iOS file system, so I can just create a new blog-specific vault?
Nope. Obsidian iOS is rigid about vault locations. Oops.
So: time to pay for a Working Copy pro license. Or, as the case may be, time to get the ten day free trial. (If something breaks within that ten days I’ll let y’all know.)
One of the features you get with that license is the ability to select the location of a new repo in the iOS file system. And that means I can just use the existing Popone folder in my personal Obsidian vault! I tried it, and… it worked. I could even add my old Popone/Archive folder to .gitignore so as to avoid clutter.
This post is the final test. I should be able to pop out of Obsidian, where I am currently writing, and into Working Copy, where I will push the changes up to GitHub. For now it takes another step to finish the build but as noted above, that’s easily fixable. I wanted to test the basic process first.
Oh, and I’m using the Obsidian Templater plugin to set up my metadata automatically. Seems to work great.
I may move all this to a new vault at some point but that’s a tweak. I’m very pleased about this as is — modularity wins again.