Quartz — publish a digital garden for free

Quartz v5

“[One] who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but [they] also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.” — Richard Hamming

Quartz is a set of tools that helps you publish your digital garden and notes as a website for free.

🔗 Read the documentation and get started: https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/

Join the Discord Community

Späti’s fork (second-brain-public)

Simon Späti’s public second brain (ssp.sh/brain) runs a heavily customized
Quartz v3 fork: sspaeti/second-brain-public (MIT, hugo branch, actively maintained). His customizations over upstream:

• #publish tag pipeline — tagging a note #publish in his private Obsidian vault automatically copies it into the public repo (his private→public gate;
  ours is the publish: true frontmatter key).
• H1 → frontmatter — first # heading is converted into title frontmatter.
• Smart description extraction — first paragraph cleaned of wikilinks, markdown formatting, list markers.
• Raw Markdown per note — every note is also served as plain Markdown at
  /brain/<slug>/index.md, so LLMs/scrapers read the Obsidian source without site chrome. See Digital gardens.
• Fork additions — case-insensitive link matching, block-reference (^hash) handling, slash-in-title normalization, large-vault perf tuning.
• FlexSearch modal — full-screen search across blog + brain together.

His stack: Obsidian (private vault) → Quartz v3/Hugo → ssp.sh/brain.
Ours: Obsidian (this vault) → Quartz v5 → brain.krzysztofkaminski.dev.

---

Summary

Static-site engine (Node) that publishes Obsidian-flavored markdown — the engine behind this garden.

Learnings

• Publishing is explicit (publish: true frontmatter); everything else stays private. Site modifications are documented in Quartz modifications.

Gotchas

• (none yet)

Hands-on

Garden — publishes garden.h (LAN) and brain (Cloudflare Pages) from the same build in ~/projects/garden-site.