my experience trying to set up my wiki
Seeing Roman's foray into setting up his digital garden finally gave me the push to set up mine as well. I mean, this blog already has a garden section with pages that are frequently updated and added to, but I mean a separate knowledge base that pulls from my Obsidian vault. I planned this to be especially for my notes and thoughts around data protection. To not be confusing, I went on to call it a wiki instead. I’m not super happy with that though, maybe I’ll find something better to call it.
I found out there were three options for me: Obsidian Publish, Obsidian Digital Garden Plugin, and Quartz.
Obsidian Publish
This one costs money, is limited to 4GB and I couldn't see if that forcibly applied to the entire vault or if I can limit it to a specific folder. That and the price motivated me to find something else; there's enough I pay for already and I have a GitHub account, so I am motivated to see if I can make it work with what I already have.
Obsidian Digital Garden Plugin
I actually found this after Quartz, but for reasons, I'll first get into this.
This one sounded like the actual dream: Just write in Obsidian, add file properties, check the boxes of these properties, set something up in the settings and in your Github (and Vercel or Netflify) and publish the notes via a command. I don't want to use Netlify or Vercel, and the docs for the plugin said that it should work for Github Pages. So I set all of that up in Obsidian and in the repo, got the custom domain running and everything, but I continually ran into issues.
It did change things in the repo, but it would absolutely not show correctly on the page. I joined their Discord to research if others had issues as well. Searching through the server, I found some fixes (adjusting the file properties, and adding a GitHub workflow) that briefly helped and the main introduction page showed up, but everything would break again after publishing additional notes for reasons not known to me.
Seeing the wiki, the Discord and the GitHub discussions around this, I concluded that GitHub Pages doesn't really work (or is at least not as stable and supported as I had expected), so I had to give up on that for now. I hope this changes in the future as it is by far the most comfortable solution, but I really suck at Git anyway and I just can't figure out why I can publish something and it works one time and doesn't work the other time when everything stayed the exact same. Also unfortunately, it pushes a lot of commits to do what it does.
Quartz
I tried this one right after I concluded I would likely not pay for Obsidian Publish (I already pay for Sync). Setup was terminal-heavy, but comparatively easy. Unfortunately I made the mistake of opening an Empty Quartz because I pressed Enter too quickly without thinking and then I felt like I had to stick it out. Couldn't figure out if I could tell Quartz to read the Obsidian file location and always import a specific folder, so I settled for always having to manually copy over the folder into /content for now (oof). The preview on localhost looked good and seemed to work. Sending it to the repo took a looooong time because I first ran into the issue of not having had created a token, and then it got blocked because of the email address. After setting the private noreply email address GitHub offers in the global config and setting the Token, it still failed because it wouldn't recognize that I had changed the email address. Had to unset it from the current push and then try again, then it finally worked.
Then I ran into the issue where npx would delete my /content folder. There are a few threads about it as well. I didn't lose anything because I am manually copying the folder from the Obsidian save location to the Quartz content folder, so I could just do that again and I had the version control in Git, but it was annoying anyway. That's when I found the Digital Garden plugin and I hoped I would not have to do all that, but since that one failed, I am now back to working with Quartz. I can deal with a deleted content folder, I guess, and there are some workarounds others posted to that issue.
It'll unfortunately have to be a GitHub Pages project. I initially planned to host it on my Nekoweb, but their Git page is too confusing and imprecise for me and I know I would not get the tech support I need on this, so I didn't even start. I had kind of hoped that I could somehow tell the GitHub repo to deploy a specific folder to my Nekoweb website, but I don't think I can; their option seems to be very tied to just backing up the site, and using SSGs.
It would be cool if I had anything to show at the end of this post right now, but I still need to move my custom domain over from the Digital Garden Plugin repo to the Quartz repo and work more on it besides test pages and the introduction.md. If anyone has any ideas, tips, etc. I am very grateful <3
Edit: I now have a little more to show for it! I changed the name to notes and it is now available here, but still under construction :) I'd say 90% of the customization is done though; there are a few things I still want to adjust and then it's ready to be populated.
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Published 15 Jun, 2025