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Issue #1

Hi friends,

It’s been a while since I last wrote you, but today I have something exciting to share.

Over the past 24 hours, I threw myself into an unexpected challenge: building my first Obsidian plugin from scratch.

And when I say scratch... I mean it.

• I had zero plugin development experience,
• zero TypeScript or Node.js background,
• and only a rough idea of how Obsidian plugins even work under the hood.

Yet — 24 hours later — I now have a working private plugin that lets me publish and update my Obsidian notes straight to my WordPress blog ✨.

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What started this madness?

I've been wanting a simple way to manage my blog posts directly from Obsidian, where all my research notes already live.
Most existing tools either didn’t quite fit my workflow or lacked the feature I wanted.

So I figured:
​"How hard could it be to build a tiny custom tool?"

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The Adventure Looked Like This:

• Wrestling with API authentication and login flows
• Taming CORS errors (involved modifying .htaccess files)
• Learning how WordPress REST APIs work behind the scenes
• Picking up TypeScript and plugin architecture on the fly
• Facing dozens of errors that felt impossible — until they weren't

There were moments I thought I broke everything.
There were moments when it actually worked, and I just stared at my screen in disbelief.

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Big Credit Where It's Due

I couldn't have pulled this off alone.
A huge part of making this possible was the guidance from ChatGPT — answering my endless, sometimes stupid, questions, helping debug errors, giving design suggestions.

(Seriously, it felt like having a 24/7 coding mentor sitting next to me.)

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✅ What My Plugin Can Now Do:

• Publish a new Obsidian note as a WordPress draft
• Update existing WordPress posts when I update a note inside Obsidian
• Handle WordPress login securely
• Display real-time success/failure messages
• Keep everything local, simple, and fast

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🎉 You Are the First to Know

I haven’t shared this anywhere else yet - not even on Instagram.
You, my newsletter friends, are the very first to hear about this.

And honestly, that feels exactly right.
This little plugin is a step toward something much bigger:
giving myself (and maybe one day soon, others) the tools to move between research notes and published writing with ease.

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What’s Next?

For now, I'm keeping the plugin private while I polish it further.
But eventually I hope to:

• Share it publicly.
• Add SVG diagram notes publishing and updating (Excalidraw drawings like the ones shown below). There is a community plugin that can do that now, but not for WordPress sites.
• Make it even easier for others to turn ideas into blog posts right from Obsidian, be it using Markdown or visual notes like these:

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Thanks for reading — and for still being here.
I hope to have a lot more coming soon: physics updates, Linux/coding experiments, and reflections from the messy but rewarding road through a PhD and beyond.

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Talk soon,
​Julia