Hello!

For a while now, I’ve been wanting a better way to document my work and ideas. Something more informal than a portfolio, but more structured than a set of notes. This is my answer! It’s a space where I can share projects, technical deep dives, and things I’m learning along the way.

Rather than use a traditional blogging platform, I wanted something lightweight, flexible, and frictionless. After some research, I landed on Hugo: a static site generator that works seamlessly with Markdown.

A Blog in 2025?

I have a portfolio that showcases finished projects - or I would if that were one of my finished projects - but not everything fits neatly into that format. Some ideas are in progress, some are experiments, and some are just interesting. This blog is meant to complement my portfolio by capturing those work-in-progress thoughts and explorations.

I also wanted a seamless way to work and publish. Since I already use Obsidian for note-taking, being able to write posts in Markdown and then quickly push them to my site made perfect sense.

The Framework

I considered a few options before settling on Hugo:

• Wordpress was too bloated for what I wanted.
• Jekyll was interesting, but I didn’t feel like dealing with Ruby…

Hugo won out because it’s fast, doesn’t require a backend, and plays nicely with the rest of the technologies I picked out.

I wanted to be able to work from any of my devices, so I needed something that would provide a really frictionless way to write. Obsidian already provided this to me, so all I needed to do was set up a new folder to house my posts. From there, I discovered that NetworkChuck had already created basically the exact setup I wanted - from Obsidian, to Hugo, to integration with my hosting provider Hostinger.

Challenges

Setting up Hugo

The setup was pretty smooth, but I was a bit overwhelmed by how many themes were available. Eventually I settled on the Stack theme by Jimmy Cai because it’s clean and flexible to my needs.

Obsidian and Cloud Syncing

As it turned out, the desire to work on multiple devices was a pretty big hassle. MacOS doesn’t give you a whole lot of help when it comes to accessing app data stored in iCloud programatically. I spent a lot of time trying to find a fix that would allow me to access my Obsidian vault to pull out the posts for Hugo. Multiple different path styles, placing the script in the iCloud drive with the files, aliasing the folder onto my local drive, setting the folder to ‘keep downloaded’… None of them worked.

In the end, I opted to put the vault directly on my iCloud drive, rather than storing it as part of Obsidian’s app data. This opened up a direct path to the files, but also meant that I can’t access the vault on their iOS and iPadOS apps. A quick workaround is just to work in a different app on those devices, or to work in another Obsidian vault and transfer the files across when I’m done.

Deployment and Hosting

I host all of my sites through Hostinger, which was really convenient in this case. I set up a webhook that checks for pushes to GitHub, and then updates the site automagically. I had some permission issues at first but they were quick to resolve.

Next Steps

Now that the blog is live, I plan to keep making small tweaks here and there, but otherwise be fairly hands off with the site itself. I want to explore more options to remotely publish content - maybe looking into Apple Shortcuts to push posts from my iPad.