My Public Second Brain

See on ssp.sh/brain.

This is a fork of the Quartz repo (v3 with Hugo). I added some additional features such as:

• Tagging with #publish automatically copies the note from my private second brain in Obsidian to this public second brain
• Converts the first header (# my title) into frontmatter and removes it (as Quartz expects)
• YouTube links in Obsidian image syntax (![title](https://youtube.com/watch?v=XXX)) render as embedded video players instead of broken images
• Callout blocks are normalized so compact and spaced forms render identically

The content/notes themselves are not published in this repo, only on ssp.sh/brain.

Explore with RAG → explore.ssp.sh

Semantic search, hidden connections, and graph traversal powered by obsidian-note-taking-assistant.

Utils

Content processing: obsidian-quartz

Rust CLI tool that processes Obsidian vault notes and outputs Hugo-compatible markdown. Handles frontmatter, tags, images, OG image generation, callout normalization, and more.

See utils/obsidian-quartz/README.md for details.

Backlink and graph creation

The tool used is hugo-obsidian, a small Go program written by Jacky. Here's the source. It is not maintained anymore (as there is now a v4 without it) and it had bugs and didn't show all my backlinks. That's why I forked it and fixed the backlinks. You can find it here: sspaeti/hugo-obsidian.

Hugo render hooks

Custom render hooks in layouts/_default/_markup/:

• render-image.html - Detects YouTube URLs and renders responsive iframe embeds (with timestamp support); all other images pass through normally

Configs

Redirects of renamed files

Find these in .htaccess

ChangeLog

2025-10-16: Fix cross-section navigation (brain ↔ blog)

• Modified assets/js/router.js to intercept clicks between /brain/ and other sections, forcing full page loads instead of SPA navigation
• Prevents "null" page errors when navigating from brain to main blog
• Compatible with assets/js/external-links.js which handles truly external links