A small, custom blog served from a Raspberry Pi at blog.tylerkno.ws. Posts are markdown files in an Obsidian vault that already syncs to S3. The Pi keeps a local mirror of the vault (cron aws s3 sync) and a Go service renders posts on demand.

Companion to notnottyler.com — same earth-tone palette and fonts, designed to be linked from there when the time comes.

Obsidian (Mac)  ──►  S3 bucket  ──►  Raspberry Pi (Caddy → Go service)
                                      ├─ aws s3 sync (cron, every 5m)
                                      ├─ fsnotify wakes the renderer
                                      └─ in-memory cache of rendered HTML

• Vault path the renderer looks at: $BLOG_VAULT_DIR/blog/. Every subfolder with an index.md whose frontmatter has published: true is a post.
• Caddy terminates TLS and reverse-proxies blog.tylerkno.ws to localhost:8106. The installer does not touch the Caddyfile — see Caddy setup below.

A post is a folder under vault/blog/ containing one index.md plus any assets it references. Folder name is up to you (only slug controls the URL).

vault/blog/
└── my-post/
    ├── index.md
    ├── image.png
    ├── template.html   # optional — full-page override
    └── style.css       # only used if template.html references it

Frontmatter:

---
title: My post
slug: my-post
date: 2026-05-12
summary: One sentence shown on the index and in the RSS feed.
published: true
---

• published: true is required. Missing or false → invisible.
• slug becomes the URL (/posts/<slug>). Falls back to the folder name if omitted.
• date accepts YYYY-MM-DD or full RFC3339. Bare dates are interpreted as noon in the binary's BLOG_TZ (default America/Denver) so that RSS readers don't roll the calendar day back to the previous day. Use RFC3339 (2026-05-12T08:00:00-06:00) if you want a specific time.
• Images and links use ordinary markdown — ![alt](image.png) and [text](other.html). Relative paths are rewritten to /posts/<slug>/... at render time so they Just Work in GitHub previews too.

This uses the Templater community plugin (not the core Templates plugin — that can't create folders). One-time setup, then "new post" is a single command.

Open Settings → Templater and set:

• Template folder location: Templates (or wherever you keep templates — must match where the file in step 2 lives).
• Trigger Templater on new file creation: off (we'll invoke it explicitly so the prompt fires).
• Under Folder Templates, leave empty.

Create Templates/Blog Post.md in your vault with exactly this content. Everything is wrapped in one <%* ... %> block; output is built up via Templater's tR accumulator so there are no cross-block variable references that some Templater versions render as raw text.

<%*
const slug = (await tp.system.prompt("Post slug (used as folder name + URL)")) || "";
const safe = slug.toLowerCase().trim().replace(/[^a-z0-9-]/g, "-").replace(/-+/g, "-").replace(/^-|-$/g, "");
if (!safe) { new Notice("Blog Post: aborted — empty slug"); return; }
await tp.file.move(`blog/${safe}/index`);
const today = tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD");
tR += `---
title: 
slug: ${safe}
date: ${today}
summary: 
published: false
---

`;
%>

The renderer uses ordinary ![alt](image.png) (not Obsidian wikilinks), so configure paste accordingly:

• Settings → Files & Links → Use [[Wikilinks]]: off
• Settings → Files & Links → New link format: Relative path to file
• Settings → Files & Links → Default location for new attachments: In subfolder under current folder (or Same folder as current file) — keeps pasted images co-located with the post.

1. Anywhere in the vault: open the command palette (Cmd+P) → run Templater: Open insert template modal → pick Blog Post.
2. Prompt asks for slug → type e.g. my-post.
3. Templater creates blog/my-post/index.md, drops you into it with the slug + today's date pre-filled.
4. Fill in title, summary, write your post. Paste images — they land alongside index.md as image.png etc.
5. When ready: flip published: false → published: true. Save. Your existing Obsidian→S3 sync ships it; the Pi picks it up on the next 5-minute tick.

Slug collisions: if blog/<slug>/ already exists, tp.file.move will surface an Obsidian error. Pick a different slug and retry — the template doesn't auto-disambiguate by design (silently appending a number would be a surprise later).

go test -race ./...                                    # unit tests
go run ./cmd/blog -vault ./testdata/vault -addr :8106  # smoke server

Then open http://localhost:8106. The committed testdata/vault/ has fixture posts that exercise the default template, a template.html override, draft gating, and the folder-name slug fallback.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tlugger/journal/main/install.sh | sudo bash

The installer:

1. Drops a bare-minimum placeholder /home/pi/blog/.env on first install — just BLOG_VAULT_DIR=/home/pi/blog/vault, which is enough to boot the service. Add any optional vars (BLOG_ADDR, BLOG_SITE_URL, BLOG_FEED_AUTHOR) yourself.
2. Detects architecture, fetches the latest release binary or builds from source if no release is published yet. Templates and CSS are //go:embed-ed into the binary — no separate asset directory.
3. Writes blog.service (systemd), enables and starts it.

Populating BLOG_VAULT_DIR is out of scope — wire up an aws s3 sync in your own crontab (or rsync, or whatever).

The installer deliberately does not touch your Caddyfile. Add:

blog.tylerkno.ws {
    reverse_proxy localhost:8106
}

Then sudo systemctl reload caddy. Caddy provisions the TLS cert from Let's Encrypt automatically given that DDNS already resolves the subdomain to your Pi.

cmd/blog/main.go                       # entrypoint: flags, fsnotify, http.Server
internal/post/                          # frontmatter, vault walk, goldmark rendering
internal/server/                        # routes, cache, handlers
internal/feed/                          # hand-rolled RSS 2.0
internal/assets/                        # //go:embed templates + static into binary
internal/assets/templates/{base,index}.html
internal/assets/static/                 # base.css + favicon bundle (palette matches notnottyler.com)
testdata/vault/                         # hermetic fixture used by every test
install.sh                              # curl|bash installer for the Pi

For live iteration on templates/CSS without rebuilds, pass -templates and -static flags pointing at the on-disk source (or set BLOG_TEMPLATE_DIR / BLOG_STATIC_DIR env vars); otherwise the binary serves the embedded copies.

Tests are in _test.go files next to each source file (stdlib testing only, table-driven, hermetic). go test -race ./... is the contract.