How this site works

This note exists partly to explain the setup and partly to prove that the Obsidian-specific syntax survives the trip to the web. Delete it whenever you like.

The pipeline

I write in Obsidian. The vault is also a Git repository. When a piece is ready I hit one button in Obsidian, which pushes to GitHub, and a build service notices the push and rebuilds the site. It takes about thirty seconds.

What survives from Obsidian

Internal links. A link like On reading badly resolves to the published essay. A link with different display text works too: the note about my interview protocol. A link to a note that isn’t published yet renders as plain text rather than a broken link, so nothing embarrassing ships.

Images. Drop an image into a note and Obsidian writes ![[filename.png]]. That becomes a real image on the site. The file goes into public/attachments, which is already set as the attachment folder.

Footnotes. Standard Markdown footnotes work.¹

Tables, quotes, code, highlights. All standard. Highlighted text renders as a highlight.

Maths. Inline like $R^{2} = 0.68$ , and displayed:

ATE = E [Y_{i} (1) - Y_{i} (0)]

Front matter

Every note needs a small block at the top. Obsidian shows this as properties rather than raw text:

---
title: How this site works
date: 2026-08-25
description: One sentence for the list view.
tags: [meta]
draft: false
---

Only title and date are required. Setting draft: true keeps a note off the live site while you work on it — it still shows up when you preview locally.

Where things go

Folder	Becomes
`content/essays`	`/essays/…` — the long pieces
`content/notes`	`/notes/…` — short posts like this one
`content/board`	`/board` — the stream of very short entries
`content/reading`	`/reading` — books, with notes and ratings
`content/papers`	`/papers` — publications, with PDF and BibTeX links
`content/pages`	Standalone pages, currently just About

Everything else in the vault — src, public, the config files — is the machinery. Obsidian is set to hide it.

Like this one. They collect at the bottom of the page automatically. ↩