Site Update - Farewell Obsidian Publish, Hello Quartz

Date: 2026-07-08

Last November I moved this site off WordPress onto Obsidian Publish. It was a huge quality-of-life upgrade — write in Obsidian, hit publish, done. But after living on it for a while (and putting a much bigger vault on it), the cracks started to show. So here’s the next chapter: both this site and SierraVault now run on Quartz, deployed to Cloudflare Workers.

Why leave Obsidian Publish?

For a small personal site, Obsidian Publish is genuinely great. The problem is how it loads.

Before it renders a single page, Obsidian Publish downloads a site-wide cache — an index of every note, its metadata, and the link graph — all at once, up front. On a handful of pages you never notice. But SierraVault is not a handful of pages: it’s 500+ game entries plus designers, developers, publishers, and guides, each cross-linked and citation-heavy. That cache ballooned to roughly 10 MB, and the browser had to pull the whole thing down before the rest of the site would load. The result was a multi-second stall on first visit — a blank-ish page while 10 MB of metadata arrived over the wire. Not a great first impression for an archive that’s supposed to be quick to browse.

That was the forcing function. If the flagship project couldn’t load quickly, it had to move — and it made sense to bring this site along too.

Why Quartz + Cloudflare Workers?

Quartz builds the vault into a fully static site — plain HTML, no big upfront download. Each page is its own file and loads on its own; there’s no 10 MB tax before the first paint. Cloudflare Workers serves it from the edge, so it’s fast basically everywhere.

A few things I gained in the move:

• Speed — static pages from the edge, no cache-download stall.
• Control — real theming, a proper search index, the graph view, and full control over URLs and redirects.
• Old links keep working — every previously-shared SierraVault link (the old Obsidian-style URLs) 301-redirects to its new home, so nothing that’s already out there breaks.
• It’s still just Obsidian — I write in the same vault; a build step turns it into the site. The authoring experience didn’t change.

What this means

Nothing you have bookmarked should break, everything should load noticeably faster, and the sites look and behave more like sites than a hosted notebook. There are still a few rough edges I’m chasing down, but the foundation is in a much better place.

As always — if you’ve stumbled into this corner of the web, thanks for poking around. More to come. 🚀