1.4 The Local Atelier: Obsidian

The sovereign way to publish to Standard Garden: your thoughts remain inside your local vault—plain Markdown files that belong to you forever—and the web garden acts as a luminous, live reflection of your thinking. File over app.

1. Connecting Your Local Workshop

  1. Open your personal vault inside Obsidian (desktop or mobile).
  2. Install the Standard Garden community plugin.
  3. Open Obsidian Settings → Standard Garden → Garden tab.
  4. Paste your personal API key (sg_…). You can generate or copy your key at any time on standard.garden via the command palette using ::api (or press Cmd+K / Ctrl+K).
  5. The plugin immediately verifies your connection, displaying your @username and account tier. You are now connected.

2. Publishing & The Mandatory Double Guardrail

To protect your privacy and ensure that personal journals, drafts, or work notes are never published accidentally, Standard Garden enforces a strict double security guardrail:

Important

The Double Security Guardrail
For any note to be visible and live on the web, both visibility: public (or unlisted) AND publish: true (or a valid scheduled date) are strictly required. If either key is absent, private, or set to false, the note will never be exposed.

Canonical Note Frontmatter

---
title: "My Note Title"
description: "A concise summary for RSS feeds and social cards."
permalink: "my-custom-slug"
created: 2026-09-19
modified: 2026-09-19
visibility: public
publish: true
cover: "/images/cover.jpg"
theme: forest
---

Publication Triggers

Once your note’s frontmatter is prepared, you can publish from Obsidian in several intuitive ways:

  • The Leaf Icon (Ribbon): Instantly publishes or updates the currently active note.
  • The Sprout Icon (Ribbon): Scans your entire vault and synchronizes every note marked publish: true.
  • The Standard Panel (Flower Icon in Right Sidebar): Visual dashboard displaying the exact status of your note (Local, Queued, Online, or Excluded), with one-click actions to publish, preview online, copy share links, or unpublish.
  • Obsidian Command Palette (Cmd+P): Run “Standard Garden: Publish current note” or “Standard Garden: Sync all notes”.

After a successful publication, the plugin stamps your local note with garden-url: so your file permanently remembers its online canonical address.

3. The 2-Way Sync Engine & Natural Cycles

Your garden is an evolving landscape. You can fine-tune how changes flow between your local vault and the web under Sync Settings:

Sync Modes

  • Grafting (Obsidian → Garden): (Default & highly recommended) Nutrients flow outward from your local roots. Your local Markdown files are treated as sovereign, sacred soil and are never altered, overwritten, or deleted by remote actions. Even if a note is uprooted online, your local file remains untouched.
  • Cross-pollination (Two-Way Sync): Bidirectional flow. If you quickly plant or edit a note from the web editor on a mobile device, the plugin will seamlessly pull those revisions back down into your local vault upon the next sync.

Natural Cycles (Automation)

  • Morning Dew (Sync on Startup): Tends and refreshes your garden automatically 5 seconds after Obsidian launches, ensuring your public garden matches your local thoughts right as your day begins.
  • Seasonal Rhythms (Background Sync): Sets an unobtrusive recurring timer (e.g., every 15 minutes, 1 hour, or 12 hours) to quietly sync changes in the background while you focus on writing.
  • Excluded Folders (Safety Zones): Designate specific local folders (e.g., Journal/, Private/, Templates/) that the plugin must completely ignore. Notes inside these folders will never be uploaded, even if they accidentally contain publishing frontmatter.

4. Root Note Index, Custom Domains & Mycelium Control

For Pro gardeners, your entire web publication identity can be configured without leaving your Obsidian files:

Assign permalink: / to any note in your vault. When published, this note takes over your personal root address (standard.garden/@username or your custom domain), transforming into your custom manifesto, portfolio, or curated index.

Custom Domains (domain:)

Declare your custom domain directly in the frontmatter of your root index note:

---
title: "Francis Fontaine"
permalink: /
domain: "francisfontaine.com"
mycelium: false
visibility: public
publish: true
---

When published, Standard Garden automatically provisions Cloudflare for SaaS hostnames and binds your domain with zero manual cloud console configuration.

Mycelium Isolation (mycelium: false)

If you operate on a custom domain and wish to publish public client portfolios, research papers, or private essays without having them surfaced in the centralized Standard Garden community directory or daily feed, specify mycelium: false. Your notes remain fully accessible to anyone on your domain while enjoying complete peace from the wider network.

5. Unpublishing (Clean & Safe)

You can retract an online note at any time directly from your vault:

  • Click Remove in the Standard Panel sidebar.
  • Or trigger “Standard Garden: Unpublish current note” from the Obsidian Command Palette.

The plugin immediately deletes the remote note and its attachments from the web, resets publish: false, clears garden-url, and never deletes or modifies your local writing.

See Also

Are you absolutely sure?

This action cannot be undone.