1.4 L’Atelier Local : Obsidian

The recommended way to publish to Standard Garden: your notes stay in your vault — plain markdown files you own — and the garden mirrors them. File over app.

Setup

Install the Standard Garden plugin in Obsidian
Open Settings → Standard Garden → Garden tab
Paste your API key (sg_…) — get it on standard.garden via the ::api command (Cmd+K)
The plugin verifies it and shows your @username — you’re connected

Works on desktop and mobile — you can publish from your phone.

Publishing

Mark any note for publishing with one frontmatter key:

---
publish: true
---

Then publish via:

The leaf icon in the ribbon — publish the current note
The sprout icon — sync every note marked publish: true
The Standard Panel (flower icon) — see the note’s status (Local / Queued / Online / Excluded) and publish, open, copy the URL, or remove the online version

After a successful publish, the plugin stamps the note with garden-url: — one key, and your file remembers where it lives online. Its presence is the “Online” marker in the panel.

Frontmatter options

publish: true          # marks the note for publishing/sync
visibility: public     # public · unlisted · private
theme: technical       # a curated theme for this note

Plus all the design tokens (colors, fonts, rhythm) — see the Customization Reference.

Images

Embedded images (![photo.png](photo.png)) are uploaded automatically when you publish — they’re rewritten to CDN URLs in the published version. Images only, 200 MB max per file.

Tending and Automation Options

The plugin offers settings to control how your vault is synchronized and formatted to keep your focus on writing.

The Flow of Nutrients (Sync Modes)

You can configure how updates flow under Sync Settings:

Grafting (Obsidian → Garden): (Default and recommended) The safest approach. Nutrients flow from your local roots to the web. Your local markdown files are treated as sacred soil and are never modified or deleted. Even if you uproot a plant online, it remains untouched locally and will bloom again on the next season.
Cross-pollination (Two-way): Standard bidirectional flow. The most recently tended version survives. If you plant a seed via the web editor, the plugin will naturally carry it back to your local soil.

Natural Cycles (Automation)

Enable automation to tend your garden without manual intervention:

Morning Dew (Sync on Startup): Nourishes the garden 5 seconds after Obsidian opens, so your public flora matches your local roots immediately.
Seasonal Rhythms (Background Sync): Set a natural timer (e.g., 15m, 1h, 12h) to quietly tend the garden in the background while you write.

Safety Zones (Excluded Folders)

If you keep personal journals, draft sheets, or template folders in your vault, you can tell the plugin to ignore them entirely under Excluded Folders. Any notes inside these folders will never be synchronized, even if they accidentally contain publish: true.

The Reading & Writing Experience

The plugin helps keep your local vault neat and your editing workspace readable.

Link Assist

Standard Garden helps tidy your note interconnections:

Only Last Link Clickable: If you reference the same wikilink multiple times in a paragraph, the plugin can make only the last occurrence clickable, keeping the rest of the text clean and readable.
Linked Mention Cleanups: Collapses unlinked mentions of notes that already have explicit links, highlighting new connection opportunities.
Cross-Tag Filters: Create advanced rules to automatically hide backlink mentions based on tags (e.g., hide mentions from #personal files on #work notes).

Scroll Map

To easily navigate long texts, the Scroll Map projects your note’s structure directly onto the edge of the editor scrollbar. It maps your headings (H1, H2, H3) to visual blocks so you can see the depth of your note at a glance. You can adjust its opacity, width, and choose between:

Map Mode: Renders a vertical outline of the note’s sections.
Progress Mode: Renders a reading completion gauge.

AI Design (the Generate button)

In the Standard Panel, describe a mood — “warm autumn palette”, “minimalist dark” — and Generate writes matching design tokens into the note’s frontmatter. The note restyles live. Reset removes them all.

Unpublishing

Two ways to remove a note from the garden, both from Obsidian:

The Remove button in the Standard Panel (when the note is online)
The command “Unpublish current note” from Obsidian’s command palette

Both ask for confirmation, delete the online version (attachments included), set publish: false and clear garden-url — and never touch your local file. No website visit required: plant, update and uproot, all from your vault.

The note IS the interface

There is no dashboard to maintain. The frontmatter of your notes is the configuration; publishing is one click; unpublishing removes the online copy but never touches your file. If Standard Garden disappeared tomorrow, your vault would be intact, untouched, yours.

1.4 L'Atelier Local : Obsidian