📆 Written: 2024-02-22
After moving the whole website over to Quartz on something of a whim, I am pleased to report, that after a few days of assessment, it has been a good move.
📂 Obsidigone?
The change has, in part, come from the deep-rooted desire I have to save money, over time. While Obsidian is awesome, and still the tool I’m using to manage content on this site, it was on the road to costing me money which I don’t really want to spend.
As I’ve said before, between Obsidian sync and publish, I was to be spending around $200 a year. I was happy with this when I originally signed up because I liked being able to use text files to manage a website. But, again, as I have said before, (on the Trendy Talk podcast) this year I am investing in making productivity and creativity sustainable by detaching it from financial commitments. - In sort, I’m not subscribing to anything anymore! (As I outlined in this post)
Leaving Obsidian publish was going to be difficult for me. I had found what I considered to be a reasonable note-taking application (I’m not saying second-brain, that productivity wankery word needs to get filed in the second-arse) as well as being able to use it to present a very snappy and, to my tastes, a nice-looking website.
Along came pal Wing who shoved a link in my hand, and literally, a day later, my website is being hosted by GitHub with literally no more work than I had before. Sure, there was a little reading and tinkering to make it work, but, now it’s set up, and now that I have an apple automaton app/script in place to push the changes it’s as easy as:
Write post ➡️ run command ➡️ wait.
Because of this, Obsidian Publish was cancelled.
📓 Obsidinot gone then?
About a week before all this, I had stumbled across the UpNote app, which is a note application with good syncing, and it is truly cross-platform (Windows/macOS/Linux/iOS/iPadOS/Android) it supports markdown, and it has a really nice interface that feels like it was inspired by Apple-Notes and Evernote in way that makes a lot of sense to my tiny brain.
The real cherry on the top was that a lifetime subscription to it is only 0.99 a month, if you are that sort of pervert.)*
✅ Hows subscription-free productivity going?
As it stands at this time, my productivity journey is looking as follows…)
- Task Manager - Todoist ➡️ Things 3
- Notes - Obsidian & Apple Notes ➡️ UpNote
- Writing - Office 365 ➡️ Scrivener
- Web hosting - Obsidian Publish ➡️ Github (Via Quartz)
- RSS - Readwise ➡️ Reader 5
- Read it Later - Readwise ➡️ GoodLinks
I think I’ve done it. I have finally ejected all productivity sub’s from my life. That was it. Now, productivity is free, and it feels great!
🗳️ That’s not 100% true, is it?
Okay, so, the only subscription that I am left with is cloud storage.
No matter how I think about it, I can’t see a way which I could not use cloud storage and, sadly, I think I will be stuck with Dropbox because it’s the one service which Scrivener works well with. Given that I will soon be hitting the limits on my free account, I may have to pay for a year of storage. I could self host something, or I could buy a hard-drive and hope for the best. Or i could juggled free storage. The thing is, Scrivener is my main tool. Writing is my main pass-time. I just want an easy life, and I want things to work properly. I am sure that given all the subscriptions I have saved, I can shell out for a Dropbox subscription… until Scrivener finally start supporting iCloud PROPERLY that is.
Note
This Was written by HexDSL, if this was liked by you, you can email him at Hexdsl@gmail.com or use this link to join Discord