obsigo v0.2 - Obsidian to hugo bridge

A converter/bridge from Obsidian to Hugo for Static Website Generation, including foreverlinks redirects for Netlify.

This is super-niche but if you are going to use Obsidian + Hugo + Netlify, this will save you so much time you'll want to hug me ;)

Why do we need this?

1. Because Obsidian is great for editing and managing a collection of Markdown files and Hugo is great for generating a static website from Markdown files, BUT:
   • Hugo works best when all your files are named index.md (but in different folders of course) but this makes it über-painful to search and manage your posts/articles in Obsidian. (Non-descriptive filenames... seriously Hugo?)
   • Both tools don't agree on the exact same flavor of Markdown (e-g: embedding YouTube videos)
   • They don't agree on the way links should be made from one file to another (the whole index.md thing again)
2. Hugo can do basic redirects BUT:
   • They are NOT proper 301 redirects (they are JS redirects, which are bad for SEO)
   • They are NOT foreverlinks (they only redirect from a single URL to another single URL, not from */old_slug or */old_slug/ to current_canoncial_URL)
3. Hugo short tags have limitations (To be addressed in a future version of obsigo)

Usage

Run ..path.to../obsigo.sh from your hugo directory.

Obsigo will read a content source directory (typically content_src but could be any location you are managing with Obsidian) and write to a destination directory (typically content) that hugo will then process to generate a static site.

Obsigo will also generate foreverlinks, typically by writing redirects to static/_redirects (those redirects are in the format expected by Netlify)

Features

Obsigo will do the following actions:

Nicer directory and filename structure

When using Obsigo, you don't have to use leaf nodes for everything and you don't have to name all your pages index.md.

You can also rename your files around in Obsidian without worrying, not only because Obsidian updates the links but also because Obsigo will detect the change and generate foreverlink redirects for you!

• Converting obsidian /xyz/pagename.md to hugo /xyz/pagename/index.md
• Converting obsidian /xyz/leaf-node/leaf-node.md to hugo /xyz/leaf-node/index.md
• Automatically handle renamed files. If /cat/oldname.md becomes /cat/newname.md, obsigo will detect it because the frontmatter slug: will still be oldname. At that point, obsigo will add oldname to the frontmatter aliases: and will change he frontmatter slug: to newname. (This will, as any alias, generate a foreverlink from */oldname to /cat/newname.
• Automatically rename source files that were named index.md to slug.md so that your source files are easier to identify in search results.

Frontmatter/Metadata processing

• Cleanup/Remove unimportant keys from your FrontMatter YAML (IMPORTANT: these changes will be written back to the source directory!)
• Collect slugs & aliases from frontmatter aliases:, slug:, the filename.md or the folder_name/index.md
  • Detect duplicates in the above!
  • Generate foreverlinks from the above and save them to a Netlify-compatible _redirects file
  • Also add additional customs redirects from _redirects_base.txt (if it exists)
• Automatically add missing slug: to frontmatter (base on filename or foldername)

Content pre-processing

• Integrate captions from image links: ![alt](image.jpg "discarded title") "caption" -> ![alt](image.jpg "caption"). This is done so that captions are clearly seen when editing in Hugo. This is also designed to be used in conjunction with a Hugo theme that supports image captions. TODO: Try hugo's shortcode for figure https://gohugo.io/content-management/shortcodes/#figure
• #hashtag linking: Convert all occurrences of #some-hastag to [#hashtags](/tags/some-hashtag.md)
• Rendering bugfix: Convert single occurrences of # to \# to prevent Hugo from interpreting it as a header
• Internal links conversion:
  • .../xyz/index.md -> .../xyz/
  • .../xyz/leaf-node/leaf-node.md -> .../xyz/leaf-node/
• YouTube: Use Hugo shortcode:
  • ![TED Talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0yhHKWUa0g) -> {{< youtube M0yhHKWUa0g >}}
  • ![TED Talk](https://youtu.be/M0yhHKWUa0g) -> {{< youtube M0yhHKWUa0g >}}

Audit features

• List all Markdown links found (for auditing)
• List all HTML links found (for auditing)
  • Suggest Markdown equivalents (to be manually applied; useful for cleaning up legacy content)