Pimp My Notes

Obsidian is one of my favorite tools that I use in my personal and professional workflows, it’s a powerful and customizable note-taking tool that uses Markdown syntax. I mainly use Obsidian to organize my notes on different tools & TTPS, and other cybersecurity-related topics, but I also use it to keep track of my notes for meetings, courses, and anything else I want to come back to later. Since my site is also written in Markdown, it makes it easy to pull from shorthand notes when writing a post as well.

It’s provided big improvements for my general workflow by making my notes, thoughts, and prior experiences searchable. By taking good notes when I’m working on a box, configuring a service, or working on a project I can all but eliminate questions like “What command did I run”, or “How did I get XYZ to work” in the future. I also love the ability to connect different notes or ideas through backlinks, creating a web of different notes and ideas (although I’m not great at maintaining them).

Two of my favorite features of Obsidian are the ability to backup notes across devices, and publish notes to a website. Generally, these are gated behind a subscription which costs a total of 12$ a month. Since I don’t want to pay, I’ll detail my setup that leverages GitHub and Quartz to get both of these features for free, as well as the rest of how I like to use the tool.

Setup

I try to create a single note per idea/topic/technique and link them together when possible. Having folders per topic, and a single note per idea helps reduce duplication across different areas.

To see some of my notes that I feel are good enough to share, checkout my notes site to get an idea of what I mean.

For example, if taking notes on a class lecture the goal would be to have notes on the individual topics within the lecture, and a page for the course where I link back to those techniques. This way if it’s brought up again in another course, I can just link back to the page I already have, and supplement what’s there.

Since things are published to Quartz, I keep a private folder for things like meeting notes, etc. which I sort of treat as my junk drawer.

My best recommendation would be to start organizing however things best make sense to you, leverage the search and backlinks, and build a structure that works for your note-taking style.

Git Sync

This is the best plugin to ever exist , it can be configured to automatically sync your Obsidian vault to a private GitHub repository that can be accessed across devices. This allows you to keep your notes from your laptop, desktop, phone, smart fridge, etc. synced for free!

I have it configured to auto-sync every 5 minutes, all you have to do is configure your authentication to GitHub in your terminal, place your Obsidian vault in a repository, and the plugin will handle the rest.

Be sure to place workspace.json in your gitignore - this has given me frequent conflicts.

Other Plugins

Here are some other plugins that I find really useful:

Excalidraw - canvas but better, let’s you use Excalidraw diagrams
Templater - allows you to create and use note templates, ex. writeup, tool, etc. templates
Advanced Tables - improves markdown tables
Omnisearch - improves search results

I also use the Reverie theme .

Quartz

Quartz is a FOSS static site generator that can easily integrate with Obsidian to publish notes to a website. I have Quartz set up to deploy to Cloudflare Pages, so every time my Obsidian vault syncs to GitHub, it’ll also update my notes site .

Quartz has great documentation on installation , setting up your repo , and hosting on CF Pages , I don’t have anything too different from what’s described.

By default, Quartz will publish everything that’s not in a private folder, or that doesn’t have the draft tag. I use Templater to have a default template for all my notes which has the basic frontmatter needed for Quartz, and since most of my notes aren’t publish-ready right off the bat, it automatically appends the draft tag.

Here’s the blank template for you to steal:

---
title: <% tp.file.title %>
description: <% tp.system.prompt("Please enter a description", null, false, false) %>
date: <% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD") %>
tags: 
aliases: 
draft: true
---

Here’s a folder listing template for you to steal:

---
title: index
description: <% tp.system.prompt("Please enter a description", null, false, false) %>
---

Taking more detailed notes both as I learn/practice new things within the field of cybersecurity, and throughout life has helped me to stay more organized both in school and at work. I hope you’re able to take something from my setup and find something that works well for you :)