You have two hundred notes in your vault. Some are fragments. Some are surprisingly good. A few are essays that just need an ending.

None of them are on the internet.

Obsidian is one of the best writing tools that exists. The linking, the graph view, the plugins, the speed — it disappears when you’re thinking. But it has no publish button. The vault is a closed system. Your notes talk to each other, not to the world.

So you start looking for a way to get your writing out.

#The Options, Honestly

Obsidian Publish is the official answer. $8 a month per site, billed annually, gets you a hosted site that renders your vault. It handles wikilinks, backlinks, and graph view on the web. If you want your published site to feel like Obsidian, it’s the closest thing.

The tradeoff: your site looks like an Obsidian vault. That’s great for digital gardens and knowledge bases. It’s less great if you want a blog that looks like a blog. The design options are limited, and readers who don’t use Obsidian won’t know what to do with a graph view.

Static site generators — Hugo, Eleventy, Astro, Quartz — give you full control. Export or symlink your vault, run a build step, deploy to Netlify or Vercel. The result can look like anything.

The tradeoff: you now have a build pipeline. A repo. A deployment config. Templates to maintain. Every time you want to publish, you’re context-switching from writer to developer. Some people enjoy that. If you do, Quartz in particular is built for Obsidian vaults and handles the conversion well.

Community plugins like Digital Garden or Enveloppe push notes to GitHub, which triggers a build. Clever, and they handle some Obsidian-specific syntax. But you’re still running a build pipeline — it’s just triggered by a plugin instead of a terminal command.

Each option adds machinery between your writing and your readers. Some of that machinery is worth it. Depends on what you need.

#The Folder Approach

Here’s a different model: your Obsidian vault syncs to Dropbox. A subfolder of that vault is your blog. Saving a file publishes it.

That’s FolderPress. Point it at a Dropbox folder, and every markdown file in that folder becomes a page on your site. No build step. No deploy. No git. Save the file, it’s live.

For Obsidian users, the setup looks like this:

1. Sign up for FolderPress and connect Dropbox
2. Create a site — this makes a folder in Dropbox/Apps/FolderPress/your-site/
3. In Obsidian, either:
   • Open that Dropbox folder as a vault (or part of an existing vault)
   • Or symlink it into your current vault

Option two is what I do. My vault lives wherever it lives. Inside it, there’s a folder that’s actually a symlink to my FolderPress site folder in Dropbox. I write in Obsidian, I organize in Obsidian, and anything I move into that folder gets published.

For the full setup walkthrough, see the getting started guide.

#What Translates Cleanly

Standard markdown works perfectly. That covers most of what a blog post needs:

• Headings (## Like This) become proper HTML headings
• Links ([text](url)) work as expected
• Images (![alt](url)) — reference any HTTPS image URL
• Code blocks with syntax highlighting
• Bold, italic, lists, blockquotes, tables
• Frontmatter — Obsidian’s YAML frontmatter carries over. Set description, published_at, or leave it all out

If you write your blog posts in standard markdown — which most people do even in Obsidian — everything just works.

#What Doesn’t Translate

This is where I need to be honest.

Wikilinks ([[another note]]) are Obsidian-specific syntax. FolderPress renders standard markdown. A wikilink will show up as literal text — [[another note]] — not a clickable link. Use standard markdown links instead: [another note](/posts/another-note).

Embeds (![[embedded note]]) won’t render. There’s no mechanism to pull in content from another file at render time. If you want to include content from another note, copy it in.

Dataview queries are plugin-generated content. They exist in Obsidian’s runtime, not in the file. FolderPress sees the raw query syntax, not the results.

Callouts use Obsidian’s > [!note] syntax. These render as plain blockquotes, which is readable but loses the colored formatting.

Tags as metadata — Obsidian’s #tag syntax in the body of a post will render as literal text. If you use YAML frontmatter tags, they’re ignored but harmless.

The pattern: anything that’s standard markdown works. Anything that’s an Obsidian extension doesn’t. This isn’t a limitation I’m planning to “fix” — it’s a deliberate boundary. FolderPress reads markdown files, not Obsidian files. The portability of standard markdown is the point.

#A Practical Workflow

Here’s what my actual writing process looks like:

I write everything in Obsidian. Notes, drafts, ideas, fragments — all in my vault with wikilinks and backlinks connecting everything. That’s my thinking space.

When something is ready to publish, I move it to my FolderPress folder. During that move, I do a quick pass:

• Convert any [[wikilinks]] to [standard links](/posts/slug)
• Remove any ![[embeds]] and inline the content
• Strip out any dataview queries
• Make sure image references point at HTTPS URLs

Name it my-post.draft.md to preview it on my site without publishing. Rename to my-post.md when it’s ready.

The conversion pass takes two minutes for a typical post. Most of my posts don’t use Obsidian-specific syntax anyway — I write blog drafts in standard markdown out of habit, saving the wikilinks for my private notes.

#Two Vaults or One

You can structure this two ways.

Separate vault: Your FolderPress site folder in Dropbox is its own Obsidian vault. Clean separation. Your blog posts don’t clutter your personal vault. But you lose the ability to link blog drafts to your private notes.

Subfolder in your main vault: Symlink the FolderPress folder into your existing vault. You get the full Obsidian experience — backlinks, graph view, search — across both private notes and published posts. The symlink means Obsidian sees the files locally while Dropbox syncs them to FolderPress.

I use the subfolder approach. My blog posts are part of my knowledge graph. Some of my best posts started as private notes that grew until they deserved an audience.

#The Tradeoff

Obsidian Publish gives you the richest Obsidian experience on the web. Static site generators give you the most design control. FolderPress gives you the shortest distance between saving a file and having it live on the internet.

What you give up: wikilinks, embeds, and the Obsidian-native features that make the app special for private knowledge management. What you keep: your editor, your vault, your workflow, your files. And a publishing step that’s indistinguishable from saving.

The best writing tool is the one you already use. The best publishing tool is the one you never think about.