Making Some Website Changes

📅 20 Sep 2025 | ⏱️ ~4 minute read

The previous post was a bit of a whinge about me logging into the amazing Kirby panel, getting side tracked and ending up tweaking stuff instead of actually writing content. Me being the sausage that I am, my potential solution was a switch to a static site generator, like 11ty.

I sat down to think about this properly and I realised that I didn't need an SSG, what I needed was a workflow for publishing content that's separate from the Kirby panel. Now, the great thing about Kirby is that it's all plaintext files under the hood, so I could just write posts in something like Obsidian, but Kirby's format is awkward to write in and I'd lose all the markdown secret sauce that Obsidian offers.

Here's an example of what a plaintext Kirby post looks like:

I'd much prefer to write in good old Markdown with some frontmatter, just like you SSG folk do. But that's not supported by Kirby; quite the quandary, dear reader.

Obsidian to the rescue (kinda)

I decided to roll my own thing and wrote an Obsidian plugin that allows me to export a markdown file with frontmatter, to Kirby's plaintext format.

This allows me to not only publish posts like I'm using an SSG, but over time it will mean I also have a markdown version of all my content. So if I did want to move, it would more simple.

I'll probably write a script to export all my current content to .md format at some point.

I've even made sure that my little Kirby Export plugin also supports my custom post types, like Books, Links and Notes. I'm really pleased with how it turned out. So much so that I'm writing this very post in Obsidian and I have to say, it's very nice.

Other changes

One thing I did want to do to simplify things, is have my notes mushed in with all the other content on this blog. Before, books, links and blog posts were on the homepage, but notes were on their own on a separate page.

I wanted my homepage to be a stream of consciousness for everything I publish. So I mushed them all together and changed the design slightly, so other post types look a little different than notes. I think it came out looking pretty good:

I created a few templates in Obsidian so I can dump them into a new markdown file and away I go - it makes getting started with a new post really simple.

Deploy script

I use Git as the backbone of my site. I have a local copy, and I deploy changes to my site as needed. To allow me to not have to go into the Kirby Panel to pull new changes that I push to the server, I write a little script that commits and pushes local changes to GitHub, then logs into my server via SSH and pulls and changes.

So I can now not only produce content within Obsidian, I can also those changes to my site with a single command. I've been writing notes like this for a few days now and it works really well - so much so that it's quickly becoming muscle memory. It does something like this:

• CTRL+N => New note.
• CTRL+P => Insert template.
• Write the post...
• CTRL+P => Export to Kirby.
• CTRL+P => Deploy.

So I don't need to take my hands away from the keyboard, or move outside of Obsidian for the entire process of creating and publishing my content.

Pretty. Bloody. Cool.

Comments & Webmentions

While I was making changes, I decided to add a comments section below all post types, using Maurice's fantastic Komments plugin. I also installed and configured his IndieConnector plugin so this site now supports Webmentions (I think - I haven't been able to test that, so we will see).

I've battled with both comments and the IndieWeb in the past, and neither ended well. So I'm not sure if these changes will stick, but I figured it was worth trying for a while. I can easily revert them if they get annoying.

Final thoughts

I know all this is adding complexity to the site, and my aim here was to simplify, but I want to see how the comments thing goes with Kirby.

To actually simplify, I do plan on pulling some of features out. Namely the Watch Log, and potentially the Guestbook too. But again, we'll see - I don't want to make too many changes in one go.

For now, I'm happy with the changes I've made. I'm not sure if this new content creation process will stick for me, or if it's just a fad. If it is a fad, I can always revert to my old way of producing content in the Kirby Panel. But if it sticks, I have a nice halfway-house between an SSG workflow, and a great CMS panel when I need it.

TL;DR - Kirby + Obsidian = ❤ ...I hope.

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