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Things you should know about Obsidian Publish — my struggles and how I'm dealing with them.
Obsidian Publish has been a game-changer for my online presence, but like any powerful tool, it comes with its quirks. Here are the hurdles I’ve faced and how I’m overcoming them.
A few days ago, I converted my blog to the Timeline System. If you are interested in more details, there’s a walk-around video that you can watch.
Photos Page
The “Photos page” was inspired by how Micro.blog handles our pictures. When there’s a JPG image in a post, that image will be displayed in a Photos page with a link back to the post.
My solution is more manual, like many other things on the website, but that’s okay. As all this AI buzz grows, I’m trying to find comfort in actually doing things with my type of AI in mind: Attention & Intention.
But don’t get me wrong, I use AI, the other type, all the time. For example, I had this long conversation with Gemini to help me come up with the CSS responsible for the /photos page layout.
Obsidian Publish Limitations
I am delighted with the progress I have made thus far. However, I have also encountered a few bugs and issues during the process.
Since I came back to Obsidian-Publish, I’ve been working hard on creating this mix of a blog and learning center. It has to be something useful for you, but, at the same time, I need a system that will make my life easy. Otherwise, I’ll just stop sharing.
You know that thumbnail when people share posts on social media? There’s a way to set an image to do that on Obsidian Publish. Although it’s a fairly straightforward setting, I never found it to be successful. And because of all the other work going on in the process of building my website, I never took the time to report this and investigate the matter.
Yesterday, I finally reported it on Obsidian’s official forum, which ended up leading me to mxstbr’s post about it.
The problem is some sort of incompatibility with the Permalink setting. I tested it on my website, and he is right. So, let’s hope the Obsidian team comes up with a fix to this.
The other issue is a site behavior that, in my opinion, doesn’t make any sense. As you already know, formatting notes in Obsidian is done with Markdown. But it’s also possible to use regular HTML.
What I found out is that any link that points to an external site will open that site in a new tab. First, I thought that I could solve that using a HTML link, but it keeps opening on another tab even if I use target="_self", which is a way to force the link to open on the same page.
After almost going crazy, I decided to inspect my website code, and, to my amazement, Obsidian Publish replaced the target="_self" with target="_blank", which is how we tell the browser to open the site on a new page.
Why? That doesn’t make any sense. We, the site owners, should be the ones deciding where the page should open.
Anyway, there’s also a complaint about this on the forum. So, let’s hope they fix it. For now, be aware that that’s the reason you’ll be sent to another tab when you click on one of my pictures on the Photos page.
No rel=“me”
This is another HTML attribute that is used by Mastodon and other services to make sure the owner of the website is the same person claiming to be that owner on another site.
It’s such a simple and easy setting, but because of the way Obsidian Publish code works, the rel="me" is not visible, and services cannot use it to verify ownership.
I’ve been complaining about this for a long time, but after being ignored for so long, I decided to come up with a workaround. Because I also needed a Linktree-style page, I created social.vladcampos.com on GitHub and that’s where I included the rel="me code.
Not everyone has time or knowledge to do this, not to mention that it’s not ideal. An official way to solve this would be to provide us with access to the <head> of the site via a file, just like we can do with the publish.css and publish.js files.
That, by the way, would address another issue. The Author Attribution verification. For that, regrettably, I could never come up with a workaround.
The Terrible RSS Feed
Finally, there’s the terrible RSS feed. I can relate to the challenges here, but there is already a feed, which, unfortunately, doesn’t make any sense. For starters, I don’t understand what the criteria used to order the notes are. If they could at least make it ordered by last created note, it would already be at least usable.
The workaround I came up with was to |manually create my feed. Unbelievable, right? It’s 2025! Anyway, I’ll do it again on my GitHub page and share the link on my Obsidian site and on the Linktree-style page.
But, please, don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled with what Obsidian Publish is enabling me to do. It’s something I have tried and failed on so many other platforms, and it’s now a fascinating work in progress.
Building your brand out of a domain name
TL;DR: Social media is a great space to become known, create authority, and grow your audience, but you need a home base that is yours. Buy a domain, create a basic website if you don’t want to spend too much time on it, and always, always promote it on all the social media services you are using.*
How having my own domain gave me so much freedom
Like many of us, I have grown tired of social media, and in recent years my posts have shifted to basically promoting the content I create and getting in touch with other creators and potential partners.
About 20 years ago, after using Geocities and other similar services, I decided it was time to establish a web presence by creating a self-hosted WordPress website with my name as the address. When that became too technical for me, I switched to WordPress.com. But I didn’t stop there. I decided to give Squarespace a shot long before it became the recognizable name it is today, primarily because I wanted a more professional-looking website.
Many years after that, I moved to Google Sites because I was already paying for it on my Workspace subscription. It ended up not working out for me because of some limitations, and last year I went back to WordPress to give it another try.
Between all the switches described above, I also tried Micro.blog and Postash.io for a while. More on this shortly. Finally, last week I moved to Obsidian Publish.
Despite all these transitions, people could always find me visiting my website. Having my own domain and using something called permalinks made this possible.
What is a permalink?
If you search for ‘what is a permalink?’ on Google, many of the results will be explanations based on the SEO benefits. That’s a good reason on its own, but I also think they are a great tool for moving your website to another hosting service. Let me tell you what I mean by this.
This was precisely what I did when going from one service to another. Many times I used the moving opportunity to remove some posts and rearrange others. But because the permalinks were kept the same, rearranging pages in different places didn’t break anything.
Here’s an example:
For a long time, I have had a page listing some of the books I have already read. The address has been vladcampos.com/library since I created it. But when I recently moved to Obsidian Publish, I decided to rearrange parts of my website structure. I now have a ‘toolbox’ directory containing the ‘library’ and other pages, like one for my filmmaking gear. So instead of the address above, I ended up with:
vladcampos.com/toolbox/library
Because the page is now located inside the toolbox subfolder, I set vladcampos.com/library as a permalink. Now, if you type vladcampos.com/library, the website will present you with the correct page. In other words, old visitors and Google Search will still find the page.
Yes, you can set up permalinks on Obsidian Publish.
Why did I move to Obsidian Publish?
Back in 2014, a company called Postash.io released a service to create blog posts from Evernote notes. All one had to do was add the “publish” tag, and the note would be converted into a blog entry. And, yes, removing the tag would unpublish the note.
Until this day, I still believe that this is a genius solution because all of my articles start with an idea that I write down and work on using an app like Evernote or Obsidian.
Postash.io is still available, but it hasn’t been updated in a long time and doesn’t have many important features a website need. That’s why I used it for less than a year back then and quickly moved on. However, as a concept, Postash.io still makes a lot of sense for my workflow, and that’s why I recently moved my site to Obsidian Publish.
Publishing became so much easier, but there are many other reasons that I’ll explore in future articles and videos. Furthermore, having the original posts on my computer as notes is like having a backup of a backup, and this is pretty comforting.
What were the lessons we learned today?
Social media platforms come and go. Use them to your advantage, but make sure you have a home base — a website with your own domain name. And if you wish to experiment with other hosting services, permalinks can help you keep all the old links working.