I keep notes on everything. Movies I want to revisit, comics I picked up, games I've been meaning to get back to. For a long time that was just a pile of text files and browser bookmarks that I'd dig through whenever I felt like writing something up. It worked, but it didn't scale, and it definitely didn't produce a website I could update without sitting down at the right machine and doing a bunch of manual steps. I wanted something I could access from anywhere, with enough automation baked in that publishing didn't feel like a second job.
What I landed on is a stack of three tools working together. Obsidian is where everything lives. Notes, drafts, triage entries, reference material, all of it sits in a vault I can open on any device. The structure matters here: there are dedicated folders for things in the queue, things in progress, and things that are done. When I capture something worth covering, it goes into triage. When I'm ready to work on it, it moves to drafts. That sounds simple because it is, and simple is what actually gets used.
n8n is the connective tissue. It watches the vault for changes and handles the mechanical parts: moving files, triggering builds, pushing content to the site. I'm not writing scripts by hand or remembering a sequence of steps every time I want to post something. The workflow does that. I write; n8n handles the rest.
Claude sits on top of all of it as the drafting layer. I feed it my notes and voice guidelines and it helps turn a triage entry into a working draft. It's not writing the posts for me. The opinions are mine, the personal context is mine, and anything that ends up on the site went through my hands. But having something that can take a rough capture and produce a shaped first draft cuts the friction down considerably.
The honest assessment: the setup took real time to get right. Obsidian has a learning curve if you want to use it for more than just freeform notes. n8n requires you to think like someone who builds workflows, which is not how most people think. And getting Claude to produce drafts that actually sound like you means doing the work upfront to define what that means. None of this is plug-and-play.
But once it's running, it runs. I can add a note from my phone, and by the time I'm at a desk there's a draft waiting. The site stays current without a ton of overhead. That was the whole goal.
If you're already living in notes and you want a path from notes to published without rebuilding your entire brain, this stack is worth a look.
