Private and Public Notes

Really just having notes that aren’t necessarily for the public but nonetheless don’t need to be private due to sensitive information, etc. And periodically posting the public-oriented ones online. (ala Work with the garage door up)

Accordingly, I suspect that if I did filter them into these categories, Public notes would likely be exceptionally larger in volume than the Private ones.

Working in public like Andy Matuschak is where you’re essentially working in private but nonetheless uploading your private works to the Internet for public consumption. You somehow don’t fall into being strongly considerate of that the work will likely be consumed by others, having their needs and wants bearing down on your conscience as you work. (In his words, Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience)

My idea of working in private is like getting the latter (not worrying about others) by way of not uploading to the internet your works unless you reach a decision point at which you upload.

Eh, not exactly. “Working in private” was sort of a response to the idea of “working in public”, but out of that I’ve noticed that I tend to think firstly in terms of making my ideas and work public. It’s kinda foreign to me to keep matters private, especially if others may benefit from them.

---

One key source of frustration for me is that I want to be able to publish my public notes and manage them all in one vault with my private ones, but I don’t want my private notes to be visible publicly.

I might be able to use some code that copies all notes in the /Public folder to my public files and fixing all internal links such that in the public files vault they don’t show as being in a /Public subdirectory at all.

This would help me work in one vault, link things together as I ultimately need to do, and not just have a subset of files in my default vault for only those whose changes I haven’t migrated over to the public site vault.

Plugin Solution

Seems like the plugin here would allow me to do this very easily! https://github.com/symunona/obsidian-bulk-exporter

Trying to figure out the ternary operator logic (as mentioned here for the plugin) I’d need to route notes without a subfolder specified. What worked was:

${subfolder!=undefined ? subfolder+'/'+slug : slug}

“Export Target Folder” is relative to your Home path, or ~/ on Linux.

Todo

• Find a link fixer for the Public pages
  • Or just go through all notes in /Public and fix the internal links
  • Seems like we need to set all _index files to having the property slug:'_index' for them to work with Quartz
• Actually setup the posts to go into a folder that Quartz then produces a site with