Quartz

A tool for publishing Obsidian to the web as a digital garden, and what I once used to publish what you are reading now.

It's built on top of Hugo which I'm told is very fast, but can be hard to use. So far I've observed builds with this tool taking around 40 seconds which is a bit slower than I'd like. My previous tool used Jekyll and took around 20 seconds.

The Official Quartz website has the instructions I followed to make this.

Why I stopped using it

Weird formatting requirements. Obsidian allows you to refer to a note without mentioning its path, such as [[software engineering]]. Quartz requires you to use Markdown links [](), with a full path and URL encoding of spaces. Attempting to use wikilinks anyway will result in broken links and backlinks. This has another consequence, Obsidian is unable to automatically update links in this format if you rename or move them.

Overall this made publishing more difficult, and maintenance of my vault difficult.

Missing features. For example, inline tags, like #claim will just appear as plain text. I requested support for these in this ticket.

Other drawbacks

Why I liked Quartz

All the words above may seem like I dislike Quartz. I enjoyed my time with Quartz, it just so happens I found something better!

Alternatives I didn't like, but you might