I started a blog.....in 2024 (why you should too)

About this video

Inspired by Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain, which he has used for over a year to capture, organize and distill information, he admits the weak step is expressing ideas, so he starts a blog in 2024. The audience in mind is mainly himself, his children, grandchildren, family and friends, covering life, hobbies such as learning Japanese, reading and movies, not just tech videos. To remove friction he builds an intentionally overcomplicated pipeline that never leaves his notes app: write a post in a ‘post’ folder inside Obsidian, sync it to a Hugo site, and let Hugo turn the Markdown into HTML. He installs Git and Go, installs Hugo, creates a site, adds the Terminal theme as a Git submodule, and edits the Hugo config to match the theme, testing locally on localhost port 1313. Front matter added in Obsidian source mode supplies the title, date and tags. Two problems need solving: syncing the post folder, done with robocopy on Windows or rsync on Mac and Linux, and images, which Obsidian stores in a separate attachments folder, handled by a Python script that rewrites image links and copies images into Hugo’s static/images folder. He then creates a GitHub repo, authenticates with an SSH key, pushes the site, and uses git subtree to publish only Hugo’s public folder to a separate branch for his host, Hostinger. A webhook from GitHub to the host triggers automatic deployment to blog.networkchuck.com. A single mega-script finally runs the sync, image script, Hugo build and Git pushes at once, so a new Obsidian note becomes a published post by running one script.

Key takeaways

• The motive comes from Building a Second Brain: a mind is for having ideas, not holding them, and the missing discipline is expressing and sharing what he learns.
• The pipeline is Obsidian for writing, Hugo for turning Markdown into a website, GitHub for storing the site, and Hostinger for hosting, connected by a webhook for automatic deployment.
• Only notes in a dedicated post folder are published; the rest of the Obsidian vault, including personal material, stays private.
• Practical fixes matter: front matter provides title, date and tags, robocopy or rsync syncs posts, and a Python script rescues images from Obsidian’s attachments folder into Hugo.
• A mega-script collapses the whole manual sequence into one run, and he stresses a blog does not need this complexity — simpler builders or WordPress achieve the same goal of starting to write.

Episode details: published November 27, 2024 · 34:35 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are NetworkChuck’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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