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🌿 Digital Garden Troubleshooting & Learning in Public

What broke, what I learned, and how I fixed it

This is a record of the entire debugging journey behind getting my Digital Garden to display clean, readable folder and note names — without the numeric prefixes, .md extensions, underscores, or hyphens that clutter the UI.

It’s both a troubleshooting log and a learning-in-public story.
Future me — and anyone building or publishing their own garden — can learn from this.

🌱 What I Set Up

I connected my tools so my Obsidian notes could publish directly to the web:

Everything worked — notes published beautifully — but the filetree was messy.

🌿 What I Tried (Styling Attempts)

Before finding the real fix, I tried several things:

1. Changed the “Sitename” in plugin appearance

→ Updated the navbar title
→ But didn’t affect the big “Digital Garden” label in the sidebar
(because that comes from the theme/layout, not site metadata)

2. Edited the filetree template (filetree.njk)

Attempted to strip numeric prefixes like 00-, 10-, etc.

It worked briefly… and then reverted the next time I published.

Why?
The plugin overwrote my changes when it regenerated templates during publish.

This hinted at a deeper truth:

Some files in the repo are “plugin-owned” and not safe to edit directly.

🌳 Key Behavior Discoveries

This project became a miniature case study in how systems behave behind the scenes.

1. Digital Garden normalizes folder names internally

This was the big aha moment.

My folder in Obsidian:

00_Start-Here

showed up in the site filetree as:

00-Start-Here

Because the plugin’s slug processor converts underscores → hyphens.
This meant my earlier attempts to replace '00-' weren’t catching the '00_' version, and vice versa.

2. The plugin regenerates core template files

Any edits made directly to default components get overwritten.
You must use:

to make changes persist.

3. The filetree receives different forms of names

Folders sometimes came through as:

So I had to clean both.

🌼 The Final Fix (in filetree.njk)

I added a cleanedName transformation that strips:

The working solution:

{% set cleanedName = fileOrFolderName
    | replace('00-','')
    | replace('00_','')
    | replace('10_','')
    | replace('20_','')
    | replace('30_','')
    | replace('40_','')
    | replace('.md','')
    | replace('-', ' ')
%}

Why this works

🌻 The Result

A beautifully clean sidebar:

Everything stays sorted in Obsidian, and looks intentional on the published site.

🧠 Why Perplexity Didn’t Find the Fix

Perplexity assumed that folder names in the GitHub repo matched the folder names in Obsidian.

They do not.

Digital Garden:

Without knowing that, Perplexity kept pointing me toward solutions that couldn’t possibly work.

The “clean both versions” insight was the key.

💡 What I Learned (The Meta Level)

🔗 References (Cleaned Up)

A curated list of sources I checked while troubleshooting:

🌈 Closing Thought

This wasn’t just a fix — it was a clarity project.

I rebuilt a system so it reflects my intentions, not its defaults.
And now I can share the path so others don’t have to fight the same fight.

This is exactly what learning in public looks like.

Tags: #digital-garden #obsidian #vercel #troubleshooting #learning-in-public #systems-thinking