A personal digital garden — notes, ideas, and writing published as a clean static website. Built with Obsidian, Pandoc, and GitHub Actions. No local build tool required.
Live site: Digital Garden
A digital garden is somewhere between a blog and a private notebook — notes that are public, evolving, and honest about their maturity level. Notes are tagged as seedling, growing, or evergreen to signal how developed they are.
This repo is both the content source and a ready-to-fork template for your own garden.
Write in Obsidian → git push → GitHub Actions builds HTML → GitHub Pages serves it
- No local toolchain. Pandoc runs in the cloud via GitHub Actions.
- No framework to maintain. Plain HTML + one CSS file.
- Free hosting. GitHub Pages with HTTPS.
- One-command publish. Push triggers everything.
The .obsidian/ folder is included and pre-configured. The fastest way to get your own garden running:
- Fork this repository
- Clone your fork:
git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/digital-garden.git - Open Obsidian → Open folder as vault → select the cloned folder
- Trust the community plugins when prompted
- Use
Cmd/Ctrl+P→ QuickAdd: New note (EN) to create your first note - Push — your site builds automatically in ~1 minute
| Plugin | What it does |
|---|---|
| Obsidian Git | Commits and pushes on a schedule — no terminal needed |
| Templater | Auto-fills note frontmatter on file creation |
| QuickAdd | New note (EN) and New note (NL) commands |
Notes live in content/en/notes/ (or content/nl/notes/ for Dutch). Each note has YAML frontmatter:
---
title: My note title
description: One-line summary
author: Your Name
written_by: 100% human # 100% human | ai-collab | ai-generated
status: draft # draft | published
type: seedling # seedling | growing | evergreen
category: Technology
created: 2026-03-24
---The build pipeline reads this frontmatter to generate the category label, byline, and note listing on the homepage.
| Layer | Tool |
|---|---|
| Writing | Obsidian |
| Conversion | Pandoc |
| Automation | GitHub Actions |
| Search | Pagefind |
| Hosting | GitHub Pages |
| Styling | Plain CSS (style.css) |
See _comms/MANUAL-01_20260321_digital-garden-setup_v02.md for the complete step-by-step guide including customisation, troubleshooting, and the full frontmatter schema.
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Colours, fonts, spacing | style.css |
| Note template | content/templates/note-template-en.md |
| Homepage content | content/en/en/index.md |
| Build pipeline | .github/workflows/deploy.yml |
Made by Bram · feel free to fork and adapt