Obsidian Architecture

As of Friday, September 11, 2026, my current workflow—Obsidian → GitHub → Quartz—has the following filesystem:

60 Public/
└── Website/
    ├── Current Courses/
    │   ├── Academic Writing/
    │   ├── Discourse Analysis/
    │   ├── Listening I/
    │   │   ├── Assignments/
    │   │   ├── Lectures/
    │   │   ├── Modules/
    │   │   ├── Resources/
    │   │   ├── Units/
    │   │   └── index.md
    │   └── Writing I/
    ├── 99 Course Archive/
    ├── Assets/
    └── index.md

Using Bases in Obsidian

I’m considering the following:

Folders = where the material lives.
Properties = what the material is.
Bases = how you view and manage the material.
Quartz = how the public sees it.

My assignment files are as follows:

Listening I/
└── Assignments/
    ├── Listening CAADI Worksheet 1.md
    ├── Listening CAADI Worksheet 2.md
    ├── Listening CAADI Worksheet 3.md
    ├── Listening I Task Week 2.md
    └── Listening I Task Week 3.md

I am considering simplifying properties to the following:

---
course: Listening I
type: assignment
week: 3
unit: 1
status: published
publish: true
due: 2026-09-18
semester: 2026-2
---

Considering a Course Materials Base that automatically gives me views such as:

Title	Course	Type	Week	Status	Due
Listening CAADI Worksheet 3	Listening I	Assignment	3	Published
Listening I Task Week 3	Listening I	Assignment	3	Published	Sep 18
Study Habits	Listening I	Module	4	Published

The major advantage is that I no longer need to navigate through folders every time I want to answer questions like:

• What am I teaching this week?
• Which assignments are published?
• What materials belong to Week 5?
• Which courses have unpublished modules?
• What is due next week?
• Which resources are lectures versus assignments versus worksheets?

One change to make to my current structure

I would slightly reduce how much information is encoded in filenames.

For example, inside:

Listening I/Assignments/

you don’t necessarily need:

Listening I Task Week 2
Listening I Task Week 3

Something like:

Week 02 - Listening Task
Week 03 - Listening Task

or a descriptive title:

Week 02 - Campus Life Listening
Week 03 - Study Habits Listening

becomes easier to scan.

The course identity is already supplied by the folder and by the course: property.

I would also standardize the main categories across your courses where appropriate:

Course/
├── Assignments/
├── Lectures/
├── Modules/
├── Resources/
├── Units/
└── index.md

Not every course needs material in every folder, but having the same conceptual architecture across Academic Writing, Discourse Analysis, Listening I, and Writing I will make the entire vault much easier to maintain.

The architecture

My aim is this:

                     OBSIDIAN
                        │
        ┌───────────────┴───────────────┐
        │                               │
   Folder structure                Properties
  "Where it lives"               "What it is"
        │                               │
        └───────────────┬───────────────┘
                        │
                      BASES
               "How I manage it"
                        │
                 ┌──────┴──────┐
                 │             │
             Obsidian        Quartz
            teacher view   student/public
                              view
                                │
                              GitHub

I will eventually have only a handful of important Bases:

1. Current Courses — everything grouped by course.
2. Teaching This Week — filtered by week/date.
3. Assignments — all assignments across courses.
4. Course Materials — modules, lectures, resources, etc.
5. Publishing Dashboard — draft/published/archive status.

Those Bases could even live outside 60 Public, because they are primarily your management interface and do not need to be published.

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role::assistant (openai@gpt-4.1-mini)

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role::user

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