Obsidian
Will 2024 be my first year without Evernote?
I think it’s fair to say that everyone was a bit astonished when the news broke on the third day of 2023. Bending Spoons, a company barely anyone knew about, had acquired Evernote.
For the past 15 years, I have never considered leaving Evernote. To be more precise, the thought never crossed my mind. Now it looks like 2024 will mean more to me than just a new year. Maybe it will be a year without Evernote. But it’s rare for something so big to happen suddenly. We have to go back to the beginning of 2022 to understand what’s going on.
I was already experimenting with Obsidian for my video production workflow when some of my clients asked me to help them build their workflows on Obsidian. That ended up starting a feedback loop of fresh ideas and more experimenting and teaching. Long story short, by the end of 2022, this learning and teaching system was at full speed. Then, boom! The acquisition news in January 2023. And, let’s not forget the chaos Twitter was in because of its own acquisition. What if Evernote experienced the same fate?
There you have it. It was a perfect storm forming before my very eyes.
What I’m trying to say is that it’s rare for only one event to cause a big change. It is usually the culmination of many small things happening simultaneously that creates the perfect conditions.
Most of my notes—about 80% of them—are still in Evernote. But if I’m quoting Pareto, the 20% of notes I’m using 80% of the time are already in Obsidian. And this makes all the difference. When I need to find something, chances are that Obsidian will have it. Which ended up helping me create the habit of opening Obsidian first. Oops!
Another important aspect of Obsidian is the fact that the mobile clients are fully functional. During short trips or vacations, I do not bring a computer with me, and I can still use Obsidian on my iPad as if I were at my office computer.
It’s not all roses, though
I was an early adopter of Postash.io back in 2014, and I loved the fact that I could convert any of my Evernote notes to pages of a website or blog posts. Sadly, the service never worked properly, and I ended up going back to a conventional website hosting service. Obsidian Publish seemed like the perfect opportunity to try that again, but although it is a very reliable service, it came with its own set of problems. As you already know, I went back to a traditional website hosting service. But this is a story for another day.
For the moment, I will leave you with this. It’s more likely than not that 2024 will be the year I switch from Evernote to Obsidian.
Happy New Year!
Building your brand out of a domain name
TL;DR: Social media is a great space to become known, create authority, and grow your audience, but you need a home base that is yours. Buy a domain, create a basic website if you don’t want to spend too much time on it, and always, always promote it on all the social media services you are using.
How having my own domain gave me so much freedom
Like many of us, I have grown tired of social media, and in recent years my posts have shifted to basically promoting the content I create and getting in touch with other creators and potential partners.
About 20 years ago, after using Geocities and other similar services, I decided it was time to establish a web presence by creating a self-hosted WordPress website with my name as the address. When that became too technical for me, I switched to WordPress.com. But I didn’t stop there. I decided to give Squarespace a shot long before it became the recognizable name it is today, primarily because I wanted a more professional-looking website.
Many years after that, I moved to Google Sites because I was already paying for it on my Workspace subscription. It ended up not working out for me because of some limitations, and last year I went back to WordPress to give it another try.
Between all the switches described above, I also tried Micro.blog and Postash.io for a while. More on this shortly. Finally, last week I moved to Obsidian Publish.
Despite all these transitions, people could always find me visiting my website. Having my own domain and using something called permalinks made this possible.
What is a permalink?
If you search for ‘what is a permalink?’ on Google, many of the results will be explanations based on the SEO benefits. That’s a good reason on its own, but I also think they are a great tool for moving your website to another hosting service. Let me tell you what I mean by this.
When you publish a page or post on a website, it may end up with an address similar to this:
your-website.com/2023/08/have-your-own-domain.html
Sometimes the address is, in reality, a permalink. In other words, an address created by the website hosting service you are using that points to a real address that is usually more boring. Something like:
your-website.com/post12345.html
This will keep the public address, or permalink, the same, no matter where you move that page in the website folder structure. Even better, if you move to another service that doesn’t have the same internal structure as the old one, you can set each post to use the permalink instead, and the external world, specifically your visitors, will have the impression that you haven’t moved at all.
This was precisely what I did when going from one service to another. Many times I used the moving opportunity to remove some posts and rearrange others. But because the permalinks were kept the same, rearranging pages in different places didn’t break anything.
Here’s an example:
For a long time, I have had a page listing some of the books I have already read. The address has been vladcampos.com/library since I created it. But when I recently moved to Obsidian Publish, I decided to rearrange parts of my website structure. I now have a ‘toolbox’ directory containing the ‘library’ and other pages, like one for my filmmaking gear. So instead of the address above, I ended up with:
vladcampos.com/toolbox/library
Because the page is now located inside the toolbox subfolder, I set vladcampos.com/library as a permalink. Now, if you type vladcampos.com/library, the website will present you with the correct page. In other words, old visitors and Google Search will still find the page.
Yes, you can set up permalinks on Obsidian Publish.
Why did I move to Obsidian Publish?
Back in 2014, a company called Postash.io released a service to create blog posts from Evernote notes. All one had to do was add the “publish” tag, and the note would be converted into a blog entry. And, yes, removing the tag would unpublish the note.
Until this day, I still believe that this is a genius solution because all of my articles start with an idea that I write down and work on using an app like Evernote or Obsidian.
Postash.io is still available, but it hasn’t been updated in a long time and doesn’t have many important features a website need. That’s why I used it for less than a year back then and quickly moved on. However, as a concept, Postash.io still makes a lot of sense for my workflow, and that’s why I recently moved my site to Obsidian Publish.
Publishing became so much easier, but there are many other reasons that I’ll explore in future articles and videos. Furthermore, having the original posts on my computer as notes is like having a backup of a backup, and this is pretty comforting.
What were the lessons we learned today?
Social media platforms come and go. Use them to your advantage, but make sure you have a home base — a website with your own domain name. And if you wish to experiment with other hosting services, permalinks can help you keep all the old links working.