un~

How I blog in 2025

I want to take some time to describe the current technical process of blogging on untilde.co.

For me, it is important to be able to jot down ideas and posts as quickly as possible. I already use Obsidian for a number of different things. I do enjoy it for writing and editing. I even made and published a plugin for Obsidian. So I decided to house my blogs also in obsidian. This all evolved and continues to evolve in 2025.

A tale of two directories

I work with two significant directories:

• My Obsidian Vault
• Local Clone of the Hugo git repository

The Obsidian Vault

For better or for worse I have all my personal notes and the public blog content in the same Obsidian Vault. To not confuse posts with my private notes I have a special folder called public/ in my Obsidian Vault. The individual blogs live in a subdirectory here.

The Filetree in Obsidian:

+inbox/
	|-- a new personal note
notes/
	|-- an old personal note
attachments/
	|-- backpack.jpeg
public/
	|-- untilde/
	|-- 01 Knolling
	|-- 02 Packing
	....
	|--- usysrc/
templates/
	|-- blogpost

Some blog posts are numbered so that they can be sorted or appear in order in various file explorers. I guess that this is probably not future-proof, and they should be ordered by publish date or something else in the future. The built-in Obsidian file explorer is relevant during writing and editing for me.

The template for the blog post is applied using the Templater plugin. I use template tags to populate the date into the frontmatter:

---
title: <% tp.file.title %>
draft: false
date: <% tp.file.creation_date("YYYY-MM-DD") %>
tags:
slug:
---
Your blogpost here

To build the site from the markdown content, I use Hugo with a custom theme that I made from scratch called ‘untilde’. I usually have a preview server running with hugo server -D -t untilde.

Commander is a great plugin to execute the scripts from my ribbon or the command palette in Obsidian. These are needed to sync my writing from the public/untilde folder to the local copy of my blog. I have two buttons: Sync and Publish.

Starting Hugo

I want to see my posts locally before I put them out there in the big scary internet. I usually pull up a new pane in Zellij and run:

hugo server -D -t untilde

This way I get to see all my posts even the ones that are still marked as draft. They appear very, very similar to how they would ‘in production’ and I typically do another round of proofreading here if I have the time and energy.

The Sync command

It executes a python script that lives in the repo of the blog. This script is the actual workhorse in this process. Essentially it copies files and transforms the markdown from Obsidian-style markdown to Hugo-style markdown. It changes the links, updates image embeds to the right path, optimizes the images and more. The length of the script grew a lot over time but since it is straight forward procedural code it’s easy to extend.

The Publish command

What it does:

• changes the working directory to the local copy of my Hugo blog repo
• creates a new git commit
• push to the remote(s)

The GitHub action is triggered by pushes:

name: Deploy to Production
on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
jobs:
  prod-deploy:
    name: prod-deploy
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: get latest
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Setup Hugo
        uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v3
        with:
          hugo-version: "0.139.4"
      - name: Build
        run: hugo --minify
      - name: sync files
        uses: SamKirkland/FTP-Deploy-Action@4.3.0
        with:
          server: ${{ secrets.ftp_server }}
          username: ${{ secrets.ftp_user }}
          password: ${{ secrets.ftp_password }}
          local-dir: "public/"

When this is done our new or edited blogposts appear on the site.

I currently use echofeed to syndicate posts from my blog to mastodon. It runs every x minutes to check for new entries in the RSS of my site and then crafts a toot including the images from the post.

Is this a good approach?

I am happy that the .git folder is not blowing up my Obsidian Vault or the Vault metadata blowing up the git repo. But I am still not 100% sure that this is the best approach. There are many things that could certainly be improved about my ‘workflow’, but it… works, and it makes it super easy to publish something. I usually need a keyboard anyway to edit blog posts so it’s no problem that I am not able to publish something from a smartphone. Having all my writing in markdown files at least gives me the option to switch to a different process in the future.

Life without a home is easy / is hard

For some reason, I saw the trailer for City Slickers today: “For Mitch Robbins turning 39 wasn’t the end of the world. It just felt like it”. This was a movie that was shown on RTL all the time in the 90s. Can you believe Jack Palance won an Academy Award for his role in that movie? As corny as the movie is: Being 39 myself and having too much time on my hands, I also had some existential thoughts. Most relevant, the ‘where’ and ‘how’ of living in my near future. In the end of the movie, Mitch Robbin’s monomyth hero’s journey is completed as expected. My own travel journey is slowly, slowly coming to an end as well. The next steps have to be carefully considered.

I could make a home anywhere, sure. But it draws me back to the city in Germany that I have been living in since my 20s. Seeing so many possibilities out there, I realized that it’s not the worst place in the world. It has very good public transportation. Karlsruhe, being a college town it is pretty bike friendly and I coincidentally do like biking. It has most the amenities you’d want, friendly people and (pretty important) lots of employment options for computer nerds like me. A close contender is Berlin, which is even more enticing in terms of employment, but it is a cold place and I even when I lived there I never felt at home.

My thoughts keep coming back to Karlsruhe. With a little patience, I would also be able to get an apartment through the housing co-op that I am a member of. It all just makes sense. I sometimes resented living in Karlsruhe for various reasons. Reminding myself that the perfect place doesn’t exist. Traveling has shown me a lot of the positives of living in Germany. And I realized that in my core I am an urban creature.

With these feelings in mind, I entered the monthly housing lottery of my co-op this week. Might take a couple of tries before I win, but I am looking forward to having a home again.

Of course, you always want what you don’t have. Same time last year, I couldn’t wait to get rid of the apartment. But I realized that for me, it is really restricting to live out of a backpack for an extended amount of time. Having a place where to put things sounds nice.

And it was never meant to last forever. Travel will of course end. I don’t regret anything. The trip is amazing. And it was great that I purged so much stuff before I went on this (now 5 months long) trip. I can restart my settled life there with hopefully less clutter in a new apartment. Maybe in a new part of town. Fingers crossed.

Getting my bearings in Bangkok

After a stopover in Manila I made my way on a red eye to Bangkok. Very sleepy I arrived at Suvarnabhumi Airport at 2 in the night trying to find my way around the A/B Grab stations to hop on a car to my hotel near Sukhumvit road.

The next day was spent walking around the immediate neighborhood and checking out the local stores. But to be honest I was still exhausted from the night lost in the flight. The spicy curry for lunch only woke me up for a couple of hours. After that I relaxed most of the day. It’s a chaotic place and I might want to try to find something a little more quiet soon.

Anyway, it seems like Bangkok is a convenient place to stay. It is a major hub that offers plenty of flights to Europe. I might need them for example to attend apartment showings or sort some stuff out in Germany. My tourist visa for Thailand is valid until early August so that gives me some time to organize things.

Leaving Japan

Narita town is 15-minute train ride from the airport of Narita – who would have thought? But seriously, it’s a cute town with an awesome temple and a street to the temple with lots of local products. Highly recommended if you want to stay the last night before your flight close to the airport. I was able to catch a real impressing firing ceremony and got lost in the temple grounds for a couple of hours. For lunch, I finally tried a Japanese McDonalds. Happy to try their edamame with corn and one the chicken sandwich had the best presentation I have ever seen. I went to the local Soba shop for dinner to get some cold Soba with Duck. Simply delicious.

This marks the end of my Japan trip. It felt like a vacation from traveling. Everything was so comfortable, new, and interesting to me. I am left with a sizable hole in my travel budget and a backpack full of souvenirs. Next up will be Thailand while I try to sort out my future. I’ll be honest: I’m drawn home to Germany and will slowly start to make my return but it might a few months until I have an apartment and the job situation has been addressed. For now: flying from Narita has been a delight. I felt safe in Japan not only because of this SecBot. Bye Japan. I am sure I will come back as there is lots that I want to see still.

Cyber cyber cyber

Walked all the way from Asakusa to Jimbocho to see the book stores there. The 50-minute trek took me once again through the backstreets of Akihabara. Most of the books were in Japanese but it was still interesting to see so many specialized shops in one place.

The somber silence in the shops and the smell of paper made for a unique atmosphere. My feet were hurting but my book loving heart was happy. I didn’t buy anything because of the usual reasons — luggage space and keeping additional weight of my poor back. Next time I’ll come with an additional bag to Japan for sure.

Tokyo and Tokyo Tower

My last days in Tokyo are spent relaxed wandering around, enjoying the city as much as possible and soaking in the vibe. I went to Roppongi but wasn’t too into it but I liked the walk to and around Tokyo Tower.

Tokyo National Museum

It’s an excellent but also immense museum. With only about 10% seen of it I got lost in the museums grounds between the old trees and the small tea houses. The weather was cozy, warm, and sunny. All the right ingredients for a relaxed day at the museum. I don’t want to leave Japan. But I have to. Soon.

A daytrip to Kawaguchi to see Fujisan

Through the jungle of lo-fi Japanese website I managed to book tickets from Shinjuku Station to Otsuki with the express train and a seat on a train back to Shinjuku from Kawaguchiko. Since I had to get from Asakusa to Shinjuku first I woke up at 5 to get the Yamanote train at 7, no need to reserve that one.

The trains were neat, tidy and on time – as always in Japan. I arrived in Otsuki after only a short 50-minute ride from Shinjuku and couldn’t wait to get on the local train to Shimoyoshida that would take another ~40 minutes. I was warned that in Summer the view could be pretty obscured, but I monitored when to see mt fuji to select the best day. It was a real good idea to reserve those seats back from Kawaguchiko because a lot of people had to stand for 1.75h after a day of walking and more walking.

The stairs up to Arakurayama Sengen Park to the Chureito Pagoda had me out of breath. Luckily there was the Arakura Fuji Sengen Shrine at the bottom of the stairs and the view at the top was more than a reward for my huffing and puffing. I thought I’d be fit from my running, but maybe I should train more stairs.

The rest of the day was spent around Lake Kawaguchiko with Fujisan looming in the back. The sun tried to kill me and shade was in high demand. It’s crowded for sure. The red bus that runs every 15 minutes was often too full, and you had to wait another 15 minutes in the sun. With plenty of time to spare I arrived back at Kawaguchiko Station and finally found a restaurant to my liking. After a late lunch consisting of Hoto Noodles and a Coke Zero I enjoyed the view of the mountain and lake until my train brought me back to Shinjuku. I arrived in Asakusa around 8 – all tired but very happy about the trip out of the city.

Coffee in Sumida Park

Nothing like some filter coffee served from a cute car

Sensoji

Kaminari Mon Gate that leads to Sesoji

Actually the Senso-ji Buddhist Temple is right around the corner of where I stay. That made it easy for me to go there and explore it bit by bit. First was Nakamise Shopping Street, then the Temple and finally all the surrounding area.

There are plenty of muscular buddhas in the temple but also this one.

Smaller structures on the temple grounds