Obsidian

Obsidian is a note-taking and personal knowledge management application built around plain text markdown files stored locally on your own device. Unlike many note apps that lock content into a proprietary database or a company’s cloud servers, an Obsidian vault is simply a folder of .md files — readable, editable, and portable with any standard text editor, independent of Obsidian itself.

Obsidian’s defining feature is bidirectional linking. Typing a phrase inside double square brackets, like [[another note]], creates a link to another note in the vault, and Obsidian automatically tracks the reverse connection too — so any note can show a list of everything that links back to it. Over time, as more notes and links accumulate, this produces a web of interconnected ideas rather than a strict folder hierarchy, which Obsidian visualises through an interactive graph view showing every note as a node and every link as a connecting line.

Beyond core note-taking, Obsidian supports a large ecosystem of community plugins that extend it well past basic writing — everything from task and project management, to spaced-repetition flashcards, to AI-assisted retrieval tools, to publishing pipelines like Quartz, which is what turns a private Obsidian vault into a public website like this one.

Role in this vault

This entire vault is written and maintained in Obsidian, living inside the content folder of the underlying Quartz project. Notes are drafted here using Obsidian’s normal linking conventions, then published to the web whenever changes are committed and pushed through Cloudflare Pages — meaning the writing experience stays exactly as it would for any private vault, while the output becomes a public, browsable site.