Jay Goldman

Writing in Obsidian

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I’ve been trying to find the best way to write for this blog that lets me be creative in the moment, without using a straight-up text editor with Markdown. That might be your jam, but I was never enough of a developer to remember all the syntax or feel like I was creatively writing. I also wanted this to work cleanly on my Mac and my iPhone, which requires a bit of work to get them in sync and using the same tools.

Enter Claude, Obsidian, and OpenClaw. I already used Obsidian for all my note-taking, with a number of “vaults” (aka notebooks) in place and synced using their Obsidian Sync service, which gives me access across all my devices. Conveniently, Obsidian vaults are just folders filled with Markdown files, which is both what this blog runs on and what AIs love to consume.

Claude cooked up a system to make this all work together. It’s elegantly simple:

  1. Write content: I can open Obsidian on my Mac or iPhone and start a new post in the Drafts folder of my JayGoldman.com vault. It’s synced between devices, so I can write from anywhere and pick it up from anywhere else. Claude made this a little more elegant by packaging this site’s CSS into an Obsidian template, so what I see is what I get while I’m writing.
  2. Add images: Obsidian handles images pretty well, so I can add them to posts, and they pop into an _attachments folder inside the Drafts folder.
  3. Publish: When I’m happy with a post, I simply move it from Drafts to a Live Posts or Live Pages folder.
  4. Deploy: I have OpenClaw running on a Mac mini. You can think of it like a dedicated, local AI agent that I can give directions to and schedule tasks with. That Mac is also syncing Obsidian, so it gets the changes as I make them elsewhere. When it sees a new Markdown file hit the Live folders, it does a little bit of magic and then adds it to this site’s Github repository and pushes it. Cloudflare’s actions pick it up from there and make it live for all of you to read.

It feels like the right balance for me — I’ll report back on how it’s settling in as I get to using it more.

Tags: ObsidianOpenClawClaude