Nature's Digital Garden

How I Build this Digital Garden

3 min read

đź”’Before: Keeping Everything Private

For a long time, all my notes lived privately in Obsidian — my second brain.
I wrote a lot: reflections, PKM ideas, infra learnings, system design notes… but they stayed hidden.

Part of me wanted to share.
Another part resisted:

“It’s not polished yet.”
“It’s not complete.”
“I’m not ready.”

Eventually, I realized — notes don’t need to be finished to be valuable.

Growth happens in the open. So I decided to build a public space for my evolving thinking — a digital garden.

🧩 First Attempts: Painful Syncing

I started creating my own publishing pipeline — I wrote scripts to:

  • export Markdown from Obsidian
  • convert [[wikilinks]] to web links
  • filter private notes
  • fix formatting and embeds for the web

It worked… but it was brittle and exhausting.
Every update felt like redeploying a full app, not nurturing a garden.

The friction was just too HIGH…

🌟 The Breakthrough: Quartz

Until I discovered Quartz — a static site framework built for Obsidian users.

It felt almost native to Obsidian:

  • đź’ˇ[[wikilinks]], callouts, embeds, tags — all rendered beautifully
  • đź”— Notes kept their original structure and bidirectional links
  • The entire site looked and felt like my vault — just on the web

But the real magic lies in the seamless workflow —

Once I set it up, publishing became effortless:

npx quartz sync

That’s it. No more writing conversion scripts. No broken links. No fighting Markdown quirks.

Just focus on writing in Obsidian — and let Quartz handle the rest.
Every update blooms into the garden with zero friction.

⚙️ How It Works, Technically

The setup was simple. I followed the official Quartz guide, and all it took was:

npm i
npx quartz create

That’s it.

It initialized everything:

  • a working site structure
  • a content/ folder for my notes
  • Quartz config files (.quartz/) for styling, routing, etc.

Then I just:

  1. Set content/ as the vault folder in Obsidian
  2. Write notes as usual
  3. Run: npx quartz sync

And boom — the entire garden goes live.

Every update, every note, every backlink… published instantly.
No more yak shaving. Just growth.

Related

This note is part of the About the Garden section.
Curious how it’s grown over time? Check out the Garden Changelog 🌱

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