Eiko Wagenknecht
Software Developer, Freelancer & Founder

Digital Garden with Obsidian and Astro

(updated ) Eiko Wagenknecht
Note

This post is a work in progress. I will update it as I set up this site.

I have been thinking about creating a digital garden for a while now, in addition to my regular blog(s). I enjoy the idea of a public place to collect notes, ideas, and resources that are interconnected and grow over time.

The concept of a digital garden is not new and it has gained popularity in recent years. So there are already tools and platforms available to help set up your own digital garden.

But I wanted to build my own, with full control over the content and design. And since I am using Astro for my blog, I thought it would be a good idea to use Astro for my digital garden as well.

Table of Contents

Current Tools

Before we start, let’s take a look at the currently available tools and platforms for digital gardens. I’m using Obsidian for my personal notes, so I’ll focus on tools that can be integrated with it.

These are good starting points, but I wanted a digital garden as feature rich as Quartz, but with the flexibility of Astro. So I decided to build my own.

What do we need?

A digital garden is essentially a collection of notes, which are interconnected in some way. So we need a way to create and link notes, and a way to display them.

I want to use Obsidian for creating and linking notes, and Astro for displaying them. So we either need a way to convert Obsidian notes to markdown files that Astro can read, or a way to read Obsidian notes directly from Astro. I’m going with the second option, because that way the notes can be directly edited in Obsidian and published without further steps.

I want to have the following features in my digital garden:

Obsidian Flavored Markdown

Obsidian uses it’s own Markdown flavour, which is based on GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM)1, and adds some custom extensions. Luckily, Astro already by default supports GFM with remark-gfm, so we only have to add support for the custom extensions:

Minimal Theme features

Technically not part of Obsidian Flavored Markdown, the minimal theme is very popular and created by a (now) member of the Obsidian team. It adds some additional features that I want to support as well:

When all is done, the whole Markdown Test page should be displayed correctly.

Additional features

Guides

For now, I have the following guides:

Note

That’s all I have for now. I will update this post as I make further progress.

Footnotes

  1. GitHub Flavored Markdown itself is a superset of CommonMark, so we need to support this as well.

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