Publishing from Obsidian using 11ty

• February 16, 2024
• Updated: February 17, 2026
• 2 min read
• obsidian
• 11ty

I have been a long-time user of Obsidian for taking notes, mostly for writing my daily journals. And I have been using the tool for several years now, it’s fantastic and better than all other note-taking tools I have ever used.

Today, as I was writing my daily journal, I got a thought what if there’s a way to quickly publish all my writings as blog posts? And I quickly started an experiment.

Since I am already familiar with the 11ty (Eleventy) static site generator, I set up a blog by using a minimal CSS framework called PicoCSS. And as I wanted a clean look, I didn’t use any pre-built themes or starter projects – did everything from scratch. After the project was set up, I opened the same folder as a new vault from my Obsidian desktop app, and it turned out, that I can successfully create new posts from Obsidian now, without the need to open my 11ty code folder.

To enhance the functionalities, I did the following things as well:

• Set up the default location for new notes so that all notes I take get saved to the same folder. It will be easier to publish later.
• Created an Obsidian template that automatically adds all the required front matter in new posts being created.
• Installed the git plugin inside Obsidian so that it automatically keeps pushing new changes to GitHub at a specified interval.

I have made the GitHub repo public, in case you want to access the source code that I was showing in the video above. And you can check the sample site as well:

• GitHub repo
• Sample site

I spent only a few hours working on it, but there can be several further enhancements made to the publishing flow. For example, the way to add internal links and images can be improved.

I hope this gives you at least some idea to experiment further.

Update: 17 Feb, 2026

I worked on it a bit more and made the following changes to the GitHub repo:

1. Environment-aware site metadata: moved from static site.json to site.js so SITE_URL can be configured per environment (local/staging/prod).
2. SEO hardening: canonical URL, OG/Twitter metadata, and dynamic fallback image/description support were improved in the base layout.
3. RSS feed added at /feed.xml for subscribers and feed readers.
4. Client-side search added with generated search-index.json + search UI page + JS behavior.
5. Better post metadata model: support for optional updated and image fields, with these reflected in post rendering and social tags.
6. Sitemap now prefers updated date (updated fallback to date) for better freshness signals.
7. Automated quality checks added: frontmatter validation + internal link checking + CI workflow on push/PR.
8. Small UX upgrades: Search/About links in nav, RSS and GitHub in footer, and polished styles for metadata/search views.

I will keep improving it, but if you have ideas, please let me know.