# Things you should know about Obsidian Publish —my struggles and how I'm dealing with them. 2025-06-16 **Obsidian Publish has been a game-changer for my online presence, but like any powerful tool, it comes with its quirks. Here are the hurdles I’ve faced and how I’m overcoming them.** A few days ago, I converted my blog to the [Timeline System](https://vladcampos.com/tls). If you are interested in more details, there’s a [walk-around video](https://youtu.be/To0bY_42Eko) that you can watch.  Long story short, the Action Container menu is where you'll find my "latest everything": [[vladcampos.com/Action/📃 Read|blog post]], [[vladcampos.com/Action/🎧 Listen|podcast episode]], [[vladcampos.com/Action/📺 Watch|video]], [[vladcampos.com/Action/📖 Currently Reading|book I'm reading]], and so on. Then, there's the Static Containers menu with my Toolbox, Library, Maker Projects, and so on. Finally, the Timeline holds all the past articles, audios, videos, and, more recently, I created a [[vladcampos.com/Timeline/Photos|space for my photos]]. ### Photos Page The [[vladcampos.com/Timeline/Photos|Photos page]] was inspired by how Micro.blog handles our pictures. When there’s a JPG image in a post, that image will be displayed in a Photos page with a link back to the post. My solution is more manual, like many other things on the website, but that’s okay. As all this AI buzz grows, I’m trying to find comfort in actually doing things with my type of AI in mind: **Attention & Intention**. But don’t get me wrong, I use #AI, the other type, all the time. For example, I had this long conversation with Gemini to help me come up with the CSS responsible for the `/photos` page layout. ![[vladcampos.com/_embedded/_newsletter|_newsletter]] ### Obsidian Publish Limitations I am delighted with the progress I have made thus far. However, I have also encountered a few bugs and issues during the process. Since I came back to #Obsidian-Publish, I’ve been working hard on creating this mix of a blog and learning center. It has to be something useful for you, but, at the same time, I need a system that will make my life easy. Otherwise, I’ll just stop sharing.  You know that thumbnail when people share posts on social media? There’s a way to set an image to do that on #Obsidian Publish. Although it’s a fairly straightforward setting, I never found it to be successful. And because of all the other work going on in the process of building my website, I never took the time to report this and investigate the matter. Yesterday, I finally [reported it on Obsidian’s official forum](https://forum.obsidian.md/t/preview-image-never-worked-for-me-on-obsidian-publish/101911), which ended up leading me to [mxstbr’s post about it](https://forum.obsidian.md/t/setting-a-permalink-breaks-the-automatically-generated-og-preview-meta-image/82132). The problem is some sort of incompatibility with the Permalink setting. I tested it on my website, and he is right. So, let’s hope the Obsidian team comes up with a fix to this. ![[vladcampos.com/Static/Toolbox/Online Presence/What is a permalink]] The other issue is a site behavior that, in my opinion, doesn’t make any sense. As you already know, formatting notes in Obsidian is done with #Markdown. But it’s also possible to use regular HTML. ![[vladcampos.com/Static/Toolbox/Markdown/What is Markdown]] What I found out is that any link that points to an external site will open that site in a new tab. First, I thought that I could solve that using a HTML link, but it keeps opening on another tab even if I use `target="_self"`, which is a way to force the link to open on the same page. After almost going crazy, I decided to inspect my website code, and, to my amazement, Obsidian Publish replaced the `target="_self"` with `target="_blank"`, which is how we tell the browser to open the site on a new page. Why? That doesn’t make any sense. We, the site owners, should be the ones deciding where the page should open. Anyway, there’s also [a complaint about this on the forum](https://forum.obsidian.md/t/allow-external-links-to-have-customized-targets/80040). So, let’s hope they fix it. For now, be aware that that’s the reason you’ll be sent to another tab when you click on one of my pictures on the [[vladcampos.com/Timeline/Photos|Photos page]]. ![[vladcampos.com/Static/Toolbox/Obsidian/Obsidian posts|Obsidian posts]] ### No rel="me" This is another HTML attribute that is [used by Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/verification) and other services to make sure the owner of the website is the same person claiming to be that owner on another site. It’s such a simple and easy setting, but because of the way Obsidian Publish code works, the `rel="me"` is not visible, and services cannot use it to verify ownership. I’ve been [complaining about this for a long time](https://forum.obsidian.md/t/mastodon-website-verification-and-author-attribution-on-obsidian-publish/100411), but after being ignored for so long, I decided to come up with a workaround. Because I also needed a Linktree-style page, I created [social.vladcampos.com](https://social.vladcampos.com) on GitHub and that’s where I included the **rel="me"** code. Not everyone has time or knowledge to do this, not to mention that it’s not ideal. An official way to solve this would be to provide us with access to the `<head>` of the site via a file, just like we can do with the `publish.css` and `publish.js` files. That, by the way, would address another issue. The [Author Attribution verification](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/07/highlighting-journalism-on-mastodon/#:~:text=To%20enable%20it%20for%20your,theverge.com%20to%20the%20list.). For that, regrettably, I could never come up with a workaround. ### The Terrible RSS Feed Finally, there’s the terrible #RSS feed. I can relate to the challenges here, but there is already a feed, which, unfortunately, doesn’t make any sense. For starters, I don’t understand what the criteria used to order the notes are. If they could at least make it ordered by last created note, it would already be at least usable. The workaround I came up with was to [[vladcampos.com/Timeline/Blog/2025/2025-06-18 • If you are fed up with Obsidian Publish's limited RSS, here's how I hacked a better feed.|manually create my feed]]. Unbelievable, right? It’s 2025! Anyway, I’ll do it again on my GitHub page and share the link on my Obsidian site and on the [Linktree-style page](https://social.vladcampos.com). But, please, don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled with what Obsidian Publish is enabling me to do. It’s something I have tried and failed on so many other platforms, and it's now a fascinating work in progress.  ![[vladcampos.com/Timeline/Blog/Posts|Posts]]