Microdotblog
Obsidian and my two-blog problem hunting me since forever.
As you may remember, I have two websites: one in Portuguese and another in English. This is something I have to constantly take into account when looking for hosting, social media, and, honestly, almost any other online activity.
When I was using Obsidian Publish, I ended up creating /en and /pt sections in the same site, but that came with several problems back then and now. For example, Micro.blog offers up to a five-blog plan, but all the posts go to the same ActivityPub feed. That’s not ideal when the blogs have different topics or languages. So, when I decided to move back to Micro.blog, I opted for two different blogs, which immediately created another problem.
I use the Micro.publish plugin to post from Obsidian, and of course, it has to be logged in to my Micro.blog account, which is now two accounts.
The first idea I came up with to fix this was to create two new vaults, one for each blog. Technically speaking, that worked very well. But it didn’t take long to see how incompatible it was with the way I use Obsidian. My notes and files are all interconnected using tags, properties, and even links. For example, I might create a trip journal note and link that to a blog post, or use an image from a note in a post. The web of connection is so deep that when I moved both blogs to different vaults, it broke many links. So, I’m back to having both blogs in my main vault.
After giving it some thought, I came up with a workaround that, to be honest, is not 100% safe. Each site has its own directory in my vault, and my main Obsidian is connected to the Portuguese Micro.blog account. Then, I created a nested vault using the English site subfolder and connected that second vault to my other Micro.blog account.
Yes, that’s a recipe for disaster if one is not careful.
To make it less prone to making a big mess, I took some precautions. The second vault now has a red accent color to make it clear I’m in a dangerous zone. In addition to that, I changed the Default location for new attachments to Same folder as current file and the New link format to Shortest path possible.
To be entirely transparent, saving attachments in the same folder is something I started experimenting with a few days ago, when I went on a trip and only used Obsidian on my phone for 10 days. That was an experience in itself, as I noticed how tricky it can be to use the app on a phone 100% of the time, but that’s a story for another day.
Back to the multiple-blog problem. Yesterday, I posted a test from the second vault, and it worked flawlessly. This will be the second post from there, but this one has links, tags, and other potential failure points.
Anyway, this multiple-language situation has been haunting me since I started my first website back in 1997, and I believe it will stick with me forever.