Over the years, I’ve tried every personal information tool you can think of. Evernote, OneNote, Google Keep and a hundred other note-taking applications – even some you may have never tried, like pencil and paper.

They all have strengths and weaknesses, but ultimately none are really better than the others. Each one fills a niche, and that niche is more about how you structure your note-taking rather than the notes themselves.

A while back I settled on Obsidian. Its simple folder structure, ability to link notes, and extensibility via a multitude of plugins fits the way I mentally approach “order” in my file organization.

Until now, none of them have ever managed to solve a problem for me, which is that I publish my thoughts on my website (which is powered by WordPress.com) but want to keep all my notes and drafts in Obsidian.

I simply despise not having all of my notes, research, and published articles in one place.

Thanks to the “obsidian-wordpress” plugin, I can now publish directly from Obsidian to my WordPress.com site via the REST API. No more writing text here and copying it there.

The plugin is not part of the official repository, so you’ll have to use the BRAT plugin to get it working.

Here’s my new and improved workflow since discovering this plugin:

I have this folder structure in my Obsidian vault for my blog.

• THIAR
  • Inbox
    • Newsletter
  • Ideas
  • Research
  • Articles
    • Assets
    • Drafts
    • Ready
    • Sent to WP
    • Socials Done
    • Fully Published
  • Projects
  • People
  • Reference
  • Dashboards

I populate “Inbox” with articles that I’ve saved from the web using the Obsidian Web Clipper browser extension. This extension saves articles and various configurable metadata (author, URL, date of publication, etc.), formats the article as Markdown, and saves it in the Inbox folder.

You can create multiple templates for the Web Clipper extension to save your clippings to different locations within your Obsidian vault or with different information. I have three templates: one to save to my blogs inbox, one for articles related to my newsletter, and a third one that saves to a clippings folder not related to my website.

“Ideas” is where I store my passing thoughts for articles as they occur to me. I have a shortcut cut for creating a note in that folder that works from my phone and tablet, so all it takes is a single press, and I’m jotting down my latest idea,

The rest of the process is self-explanatory. I regularly clear-out the inbox and ideas folders, deleting those that I’m not going to write about. If there is something I want to elaborate on, I start a new draft and link it back to the file in the Inbox, Ideas and Research folders.

Once the post is ready, I send it to WordPress, where it can sit awaiting publishing. While it waits in WordPress draft status, I craft the initial social posts and attach them to the Obsidian article.

Finally, I publish from WordPress and then move the article to “Fully Published” once all social posts have been scheduled.

The workflow works for me, but your mileage may vary. Some might find it too convoluted, and others may find it not convoluted enough.