Audience Is MeWish I Knew Beforehand
While I am against using AI for writing or creative work, I am not against using AI — in this case Gemini — to help set up the technology I use. And Lord knows I needed Gemini’s help to set up Quartz with Obsidian.
Four hours later …
Later that night …
Yesterday, out of the blue, when I was supposed to be working on my “numbers” and the Medical.base, I chose on a whim to try Quartz and Obsidian. In my subconscious, I figure I can use this site for my “medical” project, so why not jump in the deep end.
Previously, I set up Obsidian to work with Ghost Publishing, but the more I thought about it the more I didn’t want to mess with publishing bloat — the push for subscriptions, the hawking of newsletters, the self promotion, all the social media bullshit.
I looked for an alternative. I had heard about static site generators, Quartz, Hugo, Obsidian Publishing, digital gardens, but I don’t want to grow a digital garden or have a “second brain.” I just want a place to play around with some ideas, to do some writing, to organize a project or two, to casually explore and see where this goes.
Quartz was said to work well with Obsidian, so here I am.
I have no idea what I am doing.
I’ve built Wordpress sites. I’ve dabbled with html, css, but I am not a web developer, coder, or any of that. I know how to get around and get lost.
And with this ad hoc “project” I found myself in a fair share of trouble, like what the hell does this, this, and this mean and do I keep the "" marks or get rid of them? What is bash?
This is where Gemini comes in. I posted a question, often provided a screenshot, and sat back and see what guidance Gemini offered. We went back and forth for several hours.
Is this vibe coding?
I didn’t actually write any code, so I doubt it.
Maybe it’s vibe setup.
That works.
I had no idea of all the moving parts.
There’s Obsidian, setting it up for writing and publishing, the use of plugins such as Templater, Git, and Quartz something or other.
There’s Quartz and there was a shit ton of stuff to do here, of which I remember none of it. See Gemini chats on subject.
There’s GitHub, which I use as an Average Joe but not in any official or professional capacity. Commits, branches, pushes, pulls, repositories, GitHub Desktop … so much to learn.
And I forgot: There’s Cloudflare, where I bought the domain Audience Is Me and all the DNS info is housed here. I think.
Gemini also told me to use Netifly as it works well with Obsidian, but maybe I should have gone with Cloudflare here, too.
No fucking idea.
So here I sit, updating this initial post, wondering if I’m doing it right.
And praying that this actually works as I hope it will.
