I’ve been experimenting with different digital garden stacks for some years now, as you can see from Switching from Notion to Obsidian and Publishing My Obsidian.
Quartz was a big struggle to use at first, which led me to use the Digital Garden Plugin (Docs, which was great because it was the least amount of code and Terminal use. My issue was I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to customize it, nothing I was doing was working and it was frustrating me.
Eventually I went back to Quartz after a year of frustration with the customization bit. For some reason, this time around, I figured out how the issues I was having with Quartz. TBH, with the help ofai I was also able to articulate what problem I was trying to solve for and it worked out. Anyway, here’s how I’ve been customizing my digital garden
Tech stack
- Quartz — frontend template
- Github — syncing data
- Netlify — publishing
Tools
- Obsidian — creating notes/markdown files
- VS Code + Cursor — code editor
- Terminal — pushing the thing
- Claude — thought partner
Obsidian Plugins
I’m not using anything crazy right now, since the plugins have given me a lot of issues with publishing, so I don’t bother too much to make a rich-preview setup for myself. Don’t really need it anyway.
- Multi-properties — To add/edit/remove multiple properties in multiple notes at the same time
- Templater — Templating language to insert variables and functions results into notes
- Style Settings — To manually change the style of the Obsidian editor
- (in browser) Obsidian Web Clipper— To save web pages and highlights straight into my vault