Since deploying a dedicated website for publishing my notes, I’m seeking to reduce the friction in actually publishing the notes. Ideally, I want to be able to check a box and have a note published to the site.

Front-matter

I figure I can leverage the Hugo front matter to accomplish this. I’ll start by creating a daily note template in obsidian with front matter that matches what my Hugo site uses, with the addition of the field publishNote.

---
date: 
draft: "false"
title: 
hideReply: "true"
publishNote: "true"
tags:
---

Date field

Hugo uses ISO 8601 date formats. I’ll get this in bash using the following command:

date '+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%:z'

To make this easier, I’ve added an alias in my ~/.bashrc file:

alias hugo-date="date '+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%:z'"

Draft field

This field tells Hugo whether the post should be published or not. Setting this to false will publish the note/post.

Title field

This is the post’s title in hugo. For my notes, I just keep this the same as the filename

hideReply field

This field is used by the Hugo template I use to toggle a “reply” button on the post which would send an email to whatever email I configure in the template. I don’t use this feature, so this is set to false every time.

publishNote field

This a custom field I’ve added which I will use in a python script to check whether or not to publish the note.

Tags field

This is used by Hugo to add tags to the post. Tags added here will also become tags in Obsidian.