All the Ways to Get Web Content Into #Obsidian
Many of us were introduced to note-taking apps by the once great but now diminished Evernote who’s web clipper helped move it to the forefront of productivity apps. The web clipper exists as a browser extension to capture whole web pages, snippets, simplified articles or just links. It’s pretty versatile. It’s made by Evernote’s developers and using it is included in your subscription price. Obsidian, on the other hand, doesn’t have any native wen capturing capability. But, that doesn’t mean it’s difficult to get web content into your vault. It’s quite the opposite. There are almost too many way to do it.
The Bookmarklet
Steph Ango, the CEO at Obsidian makes a bookmarklet available for free - (Obsidian Web Clipper Bookmarklet to save articles and pages from the web (for Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and mobile browsers) (github.com)). He even has a link to a Bookmarklet Maker (caiorss.github.io)if you want to customize his work. I’ve had problems getting this to work on some web pages with some browsers so it’s not my preferred method.
Browser Extensions
A search of your favorite browser’s extension store will offer you several choices in Obsidian web clipping. My experience has been that the extensions are kind of flaky and don’t work all that well with one exception. The MarkDownload - Markdown Web Clipper saves web pages as markdown files wherever you tell it to. For the purpose of Obsidian, all you have to do is choose a location inside your vault. I use it on a PC and a Mac with no problems.
The Mobile Experience
I usea shortcut I wrote to capture web content on my iPhone and iPad. You are welcome to edit and improve it if you want. It’s available on Routine Hub and requires the companion app for IOS called Actions for Obsidian.. I like using it because it works regardless of the mobile browser you use and it contains a link back to the original page if you like to include that info in your file properties like I do.
Community Plugins
The best community plugins for importing web content are ReadItLater, which imports from a Url on your clipboard directly into your vault using templates depending on the type of link: YouTube, Mastodon, Wikipedia, etc. Just run a command from the palette and you have a new note.
Another easy to use plugin is Extract Url Content which scrapes web pages based on a link you have highlighted in an existing note. Again, all it takes is a single command to run it.
The final plugin I’ll recommend is the Obsidian Gem of the Year for 2023, Omnivore. By default it only imports links and highlights but you can edit your template to make it import entire articles from the free read it later service. You can even filter out certain forms of content if you don’t want ti import them. I wrote a full set of instructions, including templates on using this plugin.
Hopefully you now have a full toolset to make your web based note taking easier!