# Previous Solutions for Publishing Obsidian Files to the Web

> All of the ways I've published my Obsidian notes to the web in the past.

Source: https://curiouslychase.com/posts/previous-solutions-for-publishing-obsidian-files-to-the-web/

> [!INFO]
>  If you're curious, here's [how I currently publish Obsidian files to the web.](https://curiouslychase.com/posts/how-i-publish-obsidian-files-to-the-web/)

# Previous Solutions

## Publishing in Dropbox

Details: [Publishing my website from Obsidian files with Dropbox](https://curiouslychase.com/posts/publishing-my-website-from-obsidian-files-with-dropbox/)

I use [Obsidian](https://curiouslychase.com/tools/obsidian/) sync to sync notes between my computer and phone and had my computer's vault live in Dropbox. 

**Why it didn't work for me:**
- The Dropbox sync turned out to be really buggy between Obsidian and Dropbox.
- The Dropbox API authorization changed and I had to rewrite my fetch script
- I didn't find that I needed to publish 'on the go' as much as I thought

## Obsidian Publish

Setup Details: [Using Fly.io and NGINX for Proxying Obsidian Publish](https://curiouslychase.com/engineering/using-flyio-and-nginx-for-proxying-obsidian-publish/)

I tried [Obsidian Publish](https://curiouslychase.com/posts/obsidian-publish/) but I found it lacked a lot of what I'd want out of it.

**Why It didn't work for me:**
- The pages are rendered on the client rather than being rendered on the server, making them look less good when sharing on social media 
- Modification meant updating a JS and CSS file and re-publishing them. I don't mind this, but I want more control if I have that flexibility
- I had to setup a reverse proxy to host my own domain. I know how to do that, but I don't want to own another piece of infrastructure.
- If I moved a file, the old path would 404

## Obsidian Publish ++ 

With this solution, I attempted to fetch the notes from the [Obsidian Publish](https://curiouslychase.com/posts/obsidian-publish/) site files. This worked great for real-time publishing, having full control over look and feel _and_ having the ability to server-side render.

**Why it didn't work for me:**
- I couldn't justify the price tag of Obsidian Publish for a cached version of markdown files that I had to render on the fly
- Latency was significant for note files
- It's not a durable solution. If Obsidian changes the way they serve their files, it could break my notes quickly.