Using this vault is how the vault is kept. This is how it becomes a website.
Technically speaking, this is a fork of Quartz, upgraded and living at: hurleveur.github.io.
The vault itself is not in it — content/ is an rsync copy of my obsidian vault used during build time.
I already shared the vault squeleton with friends, as a base to follow so you don’t waste a year figuring it out, don’t hesitate to reach out to me to get it too.
Nothing private gets out
For a private vault doubling as a website, the default should be that everything is private.
publish: true in the frontmatter does that, in markdown. Of course, everything that isn’t markdown, so pdf, canvas, excalidraw, images etc needs an explicit glob in publish-exceptions.txt. Both paths default to deny. This is not the case by default for quartz.
With Evergreen notes you can split the private from the public of it easily.
The plugins
categories— a note’scategories:frontmatter files it inside any published folder of that name, on top of the folder it physically sits in. A book note underAlignment/carrying[[Library]]shows up in the library too, marked with where it really came from. This makes it possible to go beyond having one note only be in a single folder, and bring more interconnection between them.libraryandquotes— the shelf of books and the rotating quote on the front page, both read out of the vault rather than kept in a list somewhere. A quote is any line carrying an inline#quotetag, anywhere. Ultimately every section will have special styling as the library does.vault-pages— the home page’s text is the rendered body of two real vault notes. Editing the note changes the site. There is no copy to keep in sync, because a copy always drifts. One source of truth, that’s why I set this website up this way; it is my notes, publicity adds a motivator for making them clearer and better.hideLlmMarks— the vault records which notes an agent wrote and at what confidence. Useful to me, nobody else’s business, stripped from the public build.hidePrivateLinks— above.
Seven community plugins are forked into local-plugins/, every changed hunk marked LOCI PATCH so the diff against upstream stays findable when upstream moves.
The brain
The constellation is a canvas renderer over the vault’s own link graph. Three modes out of one function: the small one on the front page, the full-screen observatory, and the panel on the right of every other page. That last one shows a neighbourhood rather than the whole vault — this page, what it links to, what links back.
All of this makes it possible to always have a red thread no matter where you are in the labyrinth of my mind. You do not need to know how everything fits together, only what connects to the current note.
The band with the different categories on the main page was tricky to get right. In the end I asked AI to give me the tools to be able to place it by hand, which was much easier. Some jobs are best done yourself.
Shipping it
I like to have systems around me I don’t need to think about as per Thinking, Fast and Slow. Every day a systemd timer updates my vault with the changes I brought, beit on my phone or laptops.
It does a rsync of the vault into content/, build, mirror the output into a throwaway git worktree, then push that to a branch which holds no source history at all. A systemd timer runs it daily. The push retries five times, because a finished build thrown away by thirty seconds of DNS is an annoying way to lose ten minutes. A failure raises a desktop notification — before that existed, three of them passed unnoticed for two weeks, which is the real lesson: a silent cron job is a cron job you’ve stopped running.
I use github because coding is a big part of my identity and they provide hosting for free. open source is the base of the world
If you need someone able to think in new ways, say so. The code is all there to read to see what I can do.