Welcome! šŸ„¬

Take a look at Your First Note to get started on your exploration.

Green Web Template

This Jekyll template is a way to organize and publish your thoughts from Obsidian to the web, complete with backlinks, notes graph, and wikilink support. This template was modified by Megumi Tanaka in 2021. Hereā€™s how to install this template. View this template on Github.

Based on the Jekyll digital garden template by Maxime Vaillancourt.

How is this different?

New Features

What makes this a green template?

  1. šŸ„¬ The theme is literally green
  2. ā™»ļø Webhost and deployments run on renewable energyā€”green web hosting!
  3. šŸš€ Jekyll is a flat file system, meaning pages load faster with less demand on server resources
  4. šŸ–„ļø Obsidian is an offline Markdown editor. Your edits happen on your local computer instead of using cloud autosave functions, so writing content has a reduced computing cost
  5. šŸŖ“ Borrowing from gardening as a metaphor, this publishing system is built with the principles of digital gardening in mind.

Why not Netlify?

Iā€™m on a mission to build carbon-neutral websites, and unfortunately Netlify hasnā€™t made any statements on this front. Iā€™m in the process of switching all my web projects to Krystal UK. Even though Netlify is really easy to use and I love their mission to make a faster, flat-file web, Iā€™m going to go about it in a different way.

Green Web Hosting

Krystal UK is powered by 100% renewables, meaning šŸŒŠ hydro, šŸ˜Ž solar, and šŸƒ wind powered energy. On top of that, they invest in tree replanting and other environmental campaigns.

DeployHQ is owned by Krystal UK and runs on the same 100% renewable cloud services. Itā€™s very easy to connect Git Repositories to any server and automatically deploy.

Dreamhost is technically carbon neutral through purchasing carbon credits and sourcing some of its energy from renewable sources. I use them for domain registration.

Github hasnā€™t made a statement either, but parent company Microsoftā€™s Azure Cloud runs on 60% renewable energy and is committed to 100% renewables by 2025.

But you can still use Netlify

If you want to use this template on Netlify, just remove .htaccess and delete it from _config.yml

More great nerdy changes

See more about theme updates at Style & Theme.

PHP/Python Server Support

Powered by: Github ā€“> DeployHQ ā€“> Dreamhost

You can use this with any cheap Shared Hosting plan, since they mostly use LAMP servers (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl).

DeployHQ (free for 1 project) builds and serves this Jekyll site to the server via ssh or ftp. You can replace the server with whatever LAMP setup you want. Iā€™ve configured .htaccess so that this template will work without the need for any extra configuration.

Here are the nerdy details:

Why not Wordpress?

You might be wondering why I donā€™t just use PHP based software on a PHP server. Well, Wordpress is a database system, so each post gets saved to a MySQL database and requires more computing power than a flat file system like Jekyll.

Wordpress also hinders my ability to writeā€”not only because the editor is slow, but also the emotion I get when I open up a draft. Something about the process actually dampens my motivation to write down an idea.

Iā€™m teaching myself Jekyll, Ruby, and Liquid to modify this digital garden template because I believe itā€™s the best organization system for the way my mind works. And it makes me excited to open Obsidian and write things!

Read more about digital gardening on Maggie Appletonā€™s repo.

Template Quirks

Interesting errors Iā€™ve encountered:

License

Original Jekyll template by Maxime Vaillancourt is available under the MIT license. Buy Maxime a coffee! ā˜•ļø

This ā€œGreenā€ version by Megumi Tanaka is publicly available on Github and you are free to edit as you wish! Buy Megumi a tea! šŸµ