Valeon

Publish and sync posts to the Valeon author dashboard from your vault. Works on desktop and mobile.

Valeon is an invite-only writing platform. If you're not already an author, read How to contribute and submit the application form linked there — accepted authors receive an invite email to set up a dashboard account, at which point you can publish either via the web dashboard or with this plugin.

Install

Open Obsidian → Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search for "Valeon" → Install → Enable.

Setup

1. Sign in to the Valeon author dashboard and open Settings → API Keys. Create a new token and name it for the device (e.g. "iPhone Obsidian"). Copy the token — it is only shown once. You can revoke this token at any time from the same page.
2. In Obsidian, open Settings → Valeon publishing and paste the value into the API token field. The API and dashboard URLs are pre-filled.
3. Click Test connection to verify.

Commands

Command	What it does
Valeon: New post	Prompts for a title, creates YYYY-MM-DD-{slug}/post.md from the cached template, opens it.
Valeon: Lint post	Validates the current note against the cached server schema.
Valeon: Slugify tags (current file)	Kebab-cases all tag values in frontmatter.
Valeon: Slugify tags (vault)	Same, vault-wide.
Valeon: Publish	Lints, uploads new local assets, pushes to the dashboard. First publish creates and publishes; subsequent calls update the draft buffer and republish.
Valeon: Pull post (published)	Pulls the live published body + frontmatter into the local note. Downloads any new media into ./assets/.
Valeon: Pull post (draft buffer)	Same, but prefers the draft buffer.
Valeon: Pull metadata	Refreshes server-derived fields (publishedAt, readingTime, wordCount, audioUrl) in the valeon: block. Doesn't touch the body.
Valeon: Pull metadata (vault)	Same as above, applied to every linked note in the vault.
Valeon: Sync vault	Bulk pull for every linked note where the server's updatedAt is newer than the local valeon.remoteUpdatedAt. Conflict files get auto-backed up. Report goes to _reports/.
Valeon: Sync template from server	Refreshes the schema cache and regenerates _templates/post.frontmatter.template.md.
Valeon: Reconcile vault (preview)	Dry-run for backfill: matches local notes to remote posts and writes a report.
Valeon: Reconcile vault (apply)	Writes the valeon.postId into every matched note. Idempotent.
Valeon: Restore vault from server	Downloads every post you own from the server into a fresh folder structure.
Valeon: Open in dashboard	Opens the linked post's editor URL in your browser.

First-time backfill

If you've been publishing via the web dashboard and your vault already has post files without a valeon.postId in their frontmatter, run a one-time backfill so the plugin can match them to their remote counterparts:

1. Settings → paste token, click Test connection.
2. Run "Valeon: Sync template from server" once.
3. Run "Valeon: Reconcile vault (preview)".
4. Open the latest file in _reports/ — verify the matches look right.
5. Run "Valeon: Reconcile vault (apply)".

All matched posts now have valeon.postId in frontmatter and are considered "linked". Future edits flow through Publish.

Frontmatter conventions

The plugin manages a valeon: block at the end of frontmatter:

valeon:
  postId: k7abc...
  publishedAt: 2026-05-17T03:21:00Z
  lastPushedAt: 2026-05-17T04:00:00Z
  lastPushedBodyHash: 9f8e7d...
  remoteUpdatedAt: 2026-05-17T03:21:00Z
  schemaVersion: 1
  media:
    "abc123...": kg2xyz...

This block is stripped before sending to the server. It is purely local state. obsidian-linter's yaml-key-sort rule accepts unknown keys at the end of frontmatter, so this co-exists with the existing ordering convention.

Recommended companion: Linter plugin

The Valeon plugin ships its own Valeon: Lint post command, but it does a different job than Victor Tao's Linter plugin — the two are complementary, not redundant:

• Valeon: Lint post validates your frontmatter against the live server schema — required keys, allowed category enums, slug pattern, excerpt length, etc. It does not modify the file; it surfaces errors so publish will succeed.
• Victor Tao's Linter formats YAML and body — sorts keys, normalises timestamps, escapes special characters, trims whitespace, enforces heading and list style. It does not check whether your post is valid for Valeon; that's the job of the validator above.

Install Victor Tao's Linter plugin (community plugin id obsidian-linter) and enable Lint on save. The rules below align with the frontmatter shape Valeon expects — set these via Linter's settings tab or paste into .obsidian/plugins/obsidian-linter/data.json under ruleConfigs.

YAML key sort — keep frontmatter keys in the order Valeon expects:

title
pubDate
updatedDate
excerpt
cover
coverAlt
author
series
featured
tts
podcast
categories
tags
canonical

Set priority keys at start of YAML = on, sort order for other keys = Ascending Alphabetical. The plugin's valeon: block is treated as an "other key" and stays at the end.

YAML timestamp — manage pubDate (created) and updatedDate (modified):

Setting	Value
date-created-key	pubDate
date-created-source-of-truth	file system
date-modified-key	updatedDate
date-modified-source-of-truth	file system
format	YYYY-MM-DD[T]HH:mm:ss[Z]
convert-to-utc	on
update-on-file-contents-updated	never

Other YAML rules to enable (purely hygiene, no Valeon-specific config): add-blank-line-after-yaml, dedupe-yaml-array-values, escape-yaml-special-characters, format-tags-in-yaml.

Folders to ignore — add _templates so the linter doesn't mangle the post template that Valeon: Sync template from server writes.

The remaining list / heading / spacing rules are general markdown hygiene — pick whatever you prefer; they don't conflict with Valeon's requirements.

How assets work

Local paths in your vault stay local. The plugin:

• Reads each referenced image / document on push.
• Computes sha256, dedupes against the local valeon.media: map.
• Uploads new assets; writes the sha256 → storageId mapping back.
• Rewrites the transport copy of the markdown to /m/{storageId} — the original file is untouched.

Cross-post relative references (../another-post/foo.png) pass through unchanged.

On pull, the inverse happens: /m/{storageId} references get downloaded into ./assets/ and rewritten back to relative paths.

Conflict handling

Pull post shows a modal when local has unpushed edits AND remote has newer changes. Three options:

• Save local as backup & pull: writes post.local-backup-<ts>.md next to post.md, then pulls.
• Force pull, discard local: overwrites without backup.
• Cancel: no changes.

Sync vault always uses backup-and-pull on conflict.

Development

The production API and dashboard URLs are baked into the build at compile time. Override them for local development against a non-production Valeon backend:

set -x VALEON_API_BASE_URL "https://your-dev.convex.site"
set -x VALEON_DASHBOARD_BASE_URL "https://author.dev.valeon.blog"
bun install
bun run dev

The text fields in the plugin's settings tab remain user-editable, so you can also override per-vault at runtime without rebuilding.

Tagged releases (semver, no v prefix per the Obsidian community-plugin convention) build via .github/workflows/release.yml, attach main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css to the GitHub release, and sign the artifacts via actions/attest-build-provenance.