Apps

    My #Obsidian Journey and the Resources That Helped Me - Sample Vaults, Videos, Web Sites, Newsletters and Communities

    https://amerpie.lol/uploads/2024/school.jpeg

    After retiring from my IT career in public education in 2020, I found myself less engaged with technology news and updates. My previous habit of upgrading my phone yearly faded, and I continued using the software already on my MacBook. An Evernote user since 2009, I relied on it for everything from technical specs to recipes. My subscription auto-renewed annually without much thought.

    Within a few years, it became clear that staying at home full-time wasn’t for me. Through connections, I landed a relaxed role in the IT department at a small, private university in my hometown. It’s the perfect post-retirement job: I enjoy helping faculty, staff, and students with their tech problems without the headaches of being on-call, budgeting, or strategic planning.

    Around that time, I noticed an unfamiliar program, Obsidian, gaining popularity among the tech circles I used to follow. David Sparks (MacSparky) wrote an entire field guide about itand The Sweet Setup offered a sample starter vault. Since the guide was expensive and the sample vault was free, I naturally started there. I downloaded Obsidian and figured out how to access my new files.

    A Starter Vault

    The Sweet Setup’s Starter Vault includes articles about common Obsidian use cases like journaling. It provides instructions on how to download, install, and configure community plugins, and how to integrate them with the core plugins that come built-in, like the daily note plugin. My journaling habit and my use of the Quick Add plugin began on day one thanks to this resource.

    While other demo vaults are available, I recommend waiting a bit before exploring them. This gives you time to familiarize yourself with your own setup before adopting someone else’s system. Some notable ones include:

    YouTube

    I realized early on that Obsidian has a steeper learning curve than most software, but there seemed to be ample resources to help. True to the 21st century, I turned to YouTube and stumbled upon the perfect beginner’s video: Nick Milo’s Linking Your Thinking. He has an entire beginner’s series, but that first video truly explains the philosophy behind Obsidian. Two other YouTubers whose content I found particularly helpful were:

    • Nicole van der Hoeven: A Senior Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs, Nicole shares about learning in public, note-taking, and other interesting topics. Her videos are conversational, mostly stay under 20 minutes, and demonstrate concepts clearly. You can follow her on Mastodon: @nicole@pkm.social
    • FromSergio Though he no longer produces Obsidian videos, Portuguese YouTuber Sergio’s past content is excellent. Like Nicole, his videos are short, to the point, and easy to understand.

    Other YouTubers I enjoy include Danny Hatcher, No BoilerPlate,, and Dann Berg, who also has a blog linked from his YouTube page.

    Communities

    Obsidian users gather in three main online spaces:

    • Reddit With over 126,000 members, r/ObsidianMD is a massive subreddit. Be ready for the deluge of graph screenshots, but it’s also a helpful place to ask questions, stay updated on plugins, and interact with the community. Obsidian’s CEO, u/kepano, even moderates and interacts with users there.
    • Official Obsidian Forum This is the best place to go when you’re stumped by a problem. I’ve always received an answer to my questions here. Superuser holroy even wrote me a working DataView query on the first try!
    • Obsidian Members Group on Discord A huge and somewhat chaotic space. Many plugin developers hang out here.

    Websites

    Obsidian Rocks is the product of Tim Miller (@WebInspectInc on Twitter). I finally got the courage to use the complicated and powerful Linter plugin after reading Tim’s article on it - Automate Your Notes With Obsidian Linter. Another helpful article was Obsidian Mobile: Five Tips for Success, which helped me configure my iPhone settings so that I had many fewer problems. There are plenty of other articles on Obsidian Rocks on all facets of the apps use and I encourage you to check them out.

    Prakash Joshi Pax on Medium - One of the most helpful articles on Obsidian that I’ve ever read came from this site, Obsidian Templater Snippets I Wish I Knew Sooner.(Note: I link to Medium articles through archive.ph to avoid the paywall). There is new material being added regularly and it’s worth bookmarking and checking back. Pax also has a newsletter worth reading and he occasionally makes videos.

    I guess I would be remiss if I didn’t plug my Obsidian “how to” articles. I’ve written about plugins, backup, vault structure and more. I also answer questions as best I can. My whole career has been helping people with technology issues and I still enjoy it.

    Newsletters

    Aidan Helfant has a website, YouTube channel and a podcast about Obsidian, geared towards students but helpful for all Obsidian beginners. I subscribe to his newsletter and find value in it.

    Mike Schmitz has a website, Obsidian University where you can subscribe to his newsletter, download a starter vault or sign up for his (paid) Obsidian class. I got a lot out of his material, especially his video on configuring Obsidian’s settings.

    Inoreader - Absolutely Worth It or Why I Love My RSS Provider

    Like most of us these days, I spend a fair amount of money on app and service subscriptions. Some of it is pretty painful (Evernote!) but the cash I spend on my RSS service, Inoreader is worth it and more. I get so much value from the myriad of ways Inoreader helps me consolidate, curate and collect information from around the Internet. It does so much more than just provide a list of articles from my specified sources.

    a list of monitoring feeds from Inoreader

    Custom Monitoring Feeds

    My favorite feature, hands down, are the custom monitoring feeds Inoreader allows me to create. It scours the web every hour to search for articles using my keywords. I have monitoring feeds to help me track my favorite software titles for news and tips/tricks. The wizard that creates these feeds lets me decide whether I want to search entire articles or just titles. I can search the entire Internet or just sources from sites whose main RSS feed I follow. As with all feeds on Inoreader, I can set up a highlighter for my search terms (Obsidian, Raycast, Keyboard Maestro, Micro.blog). I can filter out terms I definitely do not find interesting (Android, Apple Vision Pro, Trump). Finally, I can filter out duplicates and near duplicates so my feed doesn’t get inundated on dates when one of my keywords makes the news, for example when updates to a certain title get released. It is possible to place all these keyword monitoring feeds into a folder and to view the output combined. I can even generate an OPML file with the output to share with others!

    Newsletter Subscription Replacement

    Inoreader allows me to generate email addresses to use in subscribing to newsletters. That way I get the benefit of their content without having my mailbox clogged up. Like every other feed, these newsletters can be saved to OneDrive, Dropbox or Google Drive. I can export them to Pocket or ReadWise, Instapaper, Blogger, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon or a custom location.

    Automation

    If you highlight text in any RSS article or newsletter, you can use the highlight to trigger an IFTTT applet. You can do the same with any article you mark to read later. In fact IFTTT has a dozen different triggers for Inoreader and over 2000 services you can connect it to.

    IFTTT triggers for Inoreader

    To add feeds to Inoreader you can use any of a variety of browser extensions, although I find that a simple bookmarklet works best for me. You can read your feeds in a web browser or in your choice of RSS readers like Reeder or NetNewsWire. I like their web interface so much that on a desktop, I choose to use a stand-alone web app of their site to read my feeds since it has easy access to most of the extra features offered. On my iPhone and iPad, I use their app as opposed to a separate RSS reader. Their iOS and Android apps have an offline mode allowing you to download content to read later, useful for flights and helping you avoid a separate subscription to a read it late service.

    Organization and Backup

    You can use folders or tags (or both) to organize your feeds. You can set up notifications for different keywords or material from certain sources. In the settings section of the Inoreader you can look at the health of all of your feeds and easily determine if one is down, allowing you to contact the blogger or publisher of the site in question. If you currently have an RSS provider or reader, Inoreader can easily import your feeds and conversely, it can export feeds for you if you want to use them elsewhere. Your feeds get backed up everyday and you can set them to be saved to a cloud folder synced with your computer so you can have ready access to them. I use Dropbbox for this.

    Other Features

    • Built in podcast player
    • Turn Google News searches into feeds
    • Customize the look with your own CSS if desired
    • Get accelerated updates on certain feeds
    • Annotate and save articles
    • Multi-lingual content
    • Sync your YouTube subscriptions
    • Filtered Reddit feeds (see Obsidian posts without having to look at pictures of other people's graphs)

    Pricing for all the features I mentioned is $7.50 a month paid annually

    My Bookmark Workflow in 2024 using #Raindrop.io and #Obsidian

    I recently found a backup of my browser bookmarks from 2009. It was a trip down memory lane looking at what i was most interested in 15 years ago (lots of cycling) and seeing what web resources are sadly no longer with us (Google+, Stumble Upon). Before browsers started syncing bookmarks I used (and paid for) Foxmarks a browser extension that synced bookmarks between different browsers. My Chrome (work) and Safari (home) bookmarks were identical. It was great. Foxmarks died when its functions were supplanted by native browser capabilities. For the next few years I relied on Chrome’s native capabilities to sync, ditching Safari. In 2022, I switched to Microsoft Edge and I’ve remained there since (on Mac, iOS and PC).

    Microsoft Edge Really Doesn’t Suck | Lou Plummer (amerpie.lol)

    Raindrop.io

    Last year I heard about Raindrop.io for the first time in an article from Mac Automation Tips. Raindrop.io is a multi-featured bookmark manager with a web interface and native apps for Mac and PC. It allows you to add sites to your collection via a browser extension. When you add a new bookmark you can assign it to a folder, add a note, tags and set a reminder to revisit the site later (paid feature)

    The free version of Raindrop.io offers enough features for may users.

    • Unlimited bookmarks
    • Unlimited collections
    • Unlimited highlights
    • Unlimited devices
    • More than 2,600 integrations (via IFTTT)
    • Apps for Mac, iOS, Android, Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge.

    The pro version offers even more benefits. If you rely on PDFs for reference, you can upload your library to Raindrop.io’s servers and take advantage of full text search and universal availability. For regular web sites, Raindrop.io saves an archive of the page when you add it to your collection so you never have to worry about losing access to an article if it gets pulled from the Internet or disappears behind a paywall. You get daily backups. I have mine saved to Dropbox so I get a local copy of them downloaded to my computer.

    Integrations I use include YouTube where every time I give a video a thumbs up it gets added to Raindrop.io. My RSS service, Inoreader, allows me to add pages directly to my bookmarks and it automates it even further by also adding starred (read later) articles as well. I also imported all my articles from Pocket and for awhile synced my bookmarks with an Evernote notebook.

    A screenshot listing the paid features of Raindrop.io

    Obsidian Integration

    I try to make Obsidian the center of my digital life. After hacking together a workflow that involved exporting my bookmarks to Dropbox via IFTTT and then moving them to my vault with Hazel, I found a community plugin that accomplished all that for me, The Raindrop Highlights Plugin can be set to only import bookmarks where you’ve made highlights or it can import every page you add to Raindrop.io (my choice). The plugin allows you to customize your import template for the body of the note and the metadata. If you choose (recommended), it will duplicate the folder structure you’ve created for your collection. Vitally, you can import the tags you assign as you add bookmarks so that if, like me, you use tag-based MOCs (maps of content) in Obsidian, your imported bookmarks will get automatically added.

    If you’d occasionally like to add the full content of a page, you can use the community plugin ReadItLater which will import a website from a URL on your clipboard. Even if you don’t import the content of the page, the clean interface of an imported bookmark note invites you to add your own commentary and to add internal links to other notes on the same topic, Obsidian’s super power.

    The Raindrop.io web interface

    A Lovely Routine - The Digital Checklist That Brings Me Joy Every Day and The Hunt for Links

    A dimly lit library

    I have a digital checklist I try to complete every day. It helps me do the mundane things we all have to do, stay on top of my email, organize my notes, keep important software updated. My checklist also helps me to remember to do the fun things I enjoy: uploading a photo every day to Micro.blog where it gets cross posted to all the social media sites in which I participate. I have a reminder to check in daily at Product Hunt because I enjoy seeing what’s new in the software categories I follow. The other “fun” item I try to check off seven days a week is to find a bookmark to share.

    Every Saturday morning, I get up at 4am to drink coffee and work interrupted on posting to my blog. I keep a running note all week in Obsidian where I add each day’s link. I write a short blurb for each site, download/upload a few images and post the links. My uber original name for this feature is (drumroll) This Week’s Bookmarks.

    I subscribe to way too many newsletters and what keeps me interested in them is looking for the link of the day. Ironically, some of what I subscribe too are other people’s weekly link posts! I’ll share anything that looks like it might catch the eye of a curious person. It could be a story about the world’s coolest streets or something funny like the Washington Post’s collection of one-star reviews of National Parks. I rarely share news stories. I aim for something with a little shelf life. I’m a techie and a blogger so there’s plenty of stuff there for like-minded folks.

    Right now, I’m keeping a running list of several week’s worth of links. One day it will get too unwieldy, and I’ll have to pare it down or start a volume two or something, but for now it’s there to explore. If you check it out and find anything useful or entertaining it would mean the world to me if you let me know.

    Matthias Ott, author of the wonderful newsletter Own Your Web, wrote a piece recently about all the reasons why creating a links page is an integral part of the IndieWeb. He listed different ways to share your finds (like newsletters and RSS feeds) and he gave multiple reasons for collecting links in the first place. He’s the inspiration for this reflection.

    A couple of bloggers I like have weekly links posts or newsletters. Check out the HeyDingus Seven Things This Week collection and let the writer, Jarrod Blundy know that I sent you. While you’re at it, look at Ian Betteridge’s new 10 Blue Links which he’ll be happy to email you each week.

    Peace! Lou, in NC
    Lou Plummer | Amerpie
    Email

    CloudHQ - Adding Functionality to Google Services: Gmail. Google Drive and Search

    My Original Problem

    I still have my “Welcome to Gmail” message dated February 21, 2005. When Google Drive was introduced in 2012 I adopted it as my primary cloud storage service. For some unknown reason, Google has never implemented a way to automate saving email attachments to the cloud. Once upon a time IFTTT used to have an applet that would do this for you but it’s been deprecated and no longer works. In my search for a solution, I discovered CloudHQ.

    CloudHQ has over 60 Google Workspace related services, some paid, many free. My initial search led me to implement their backup and sync utility. It has the power to save all of your email to Google Drive as PDFs which was a bit overkill for my use case. All I wanted was to save attachments. The process was simple:

    1. First I created a label in Gmail called attachments
    2. Then I created a filter that applied that label to all emails addressed to me with attachments. The “addressed to me” part is important because without that emails that I send with attachments would also get included.
    3. The next step was to associate my Gmail account as the source for the CloudHQ app and to designate a folder in my Google Drive as the destination for the saved files.

    But What About…

    I found that occasionally I do actually have a need to save an email as a PDF. I could of course use a print to PDF option but it’s much easier to use the CloudHQ utility Save Emails to Google Drive.Once installed this utility adds a button to your Gmail web interface that allows for one click saving of an email. It creates a link to the email on the fly and asks if you want to save it to your clipboard. I find it particularly useful for receipts that I want to add to Evernote.

    A Useful AI Tool

    In exploring the CloudHQ catalog, I discovered their browser plugin for Chromium browsers that integrates ChatGPT into every search. Search results from Google with the CloudHQ plugin installed

    It’s a real time saver, offering both a traditional Google search along with a comprehensive AI query. You get both on the same page any time you conduct a search. By default it uses ChatGPT 3.5 but you can provide your own API key and use ChatGPT 4 if you desire. For most searches I find that v3.5 is sufficient (and cheaper).

    More

    The variety of services offered by CloudHQ is extensive and are not limited to Google Workspace products. They offer Microsoft Office 365 tools as well as solutions for use with Dropbox for Business and Box. I haven’t used those but there is extensive information on their web site. Since I’m a Gmail user I intend to explore some of the plugins CloudHQ offers, including:

    • Free Email Tracker
    • Gmail YouTube
    • Free Video Email for Gmail

    A list of Gmail related services from CloudHQ

    I used ChatGPT to craft a Python script today that edited 500+ markdown files (my imported Raindrop.io bookmarks) from my #Obsidian vault. It moved text in the form of an inline properties field for URLs from the body of the note into the YAML front matter. I knew next to nothing about #Python.

    App of the Day is Clipboard Fusion - Syncs your clipboard between your Mac, PC and phone, iPhone or Android. Allows for saved clipboards for frequently used text. I keep my OpenAI api key on mine. It’s a real solution if your work OS is different than your home OS.

    Today and tomorrow only - price reduced software at the Indie App Sale - My purchases: Audracity, Nametag, Photoscope, Evo, Logger, Mastowatch, Presets, Relog

    For any users of the Little Snitch firewall program on Mac. I just found a terrific blocklist via Reddit for 135K sites with trackers, malware, etc. You can subscribe and have it updated daily via the dev’s page on Github #security

    FreeTube is a YouTube client for Windows, Mac, and Linux built around using YouTube more privately. You can enjoy your favorite content and creators without your habits being tracked. All of your user data is stored locally and never sent or published to the internet. FreeTube grabs data by scraping the information it needs (with either local methods or by optionally utilizing the Invidious API). With many features similar to YouTube, FreeTube has become one of the best methods to watch YouTube privately on desktop.

    Freetube - The best ad-free YouTube experience.

    I love the Internet and I love milestones. Reddit is still one of the most informative sites on the Internet despite the knuckleheads there among the users and management. Today, my Reddit account is old enough to vote. Happy Cake Day To Me!

    It’s Saturday and my /now page is updated with American and British journalists, a tale from 17th century Japan, iOS and #Obsidian news and a tasty sandwich. What’s up now

    The #iOS Apps I Use Every Day - Broken Down by Time of Day and Purpose

    An iPhone floating in the air above someone’s open hand

    Early AM

    • Things 3 (Task management)
    • Ivory for Mastodon (social media)
    • Product Hunt (Because I’m a software junkie)
    • Obsidian (Inbox app, used for daily journal and logging)
    • Day One (journal app)
    • Yahoo Mail (newsletter subscriptions only)
    • Facebook (mostly for family stuff)
    • Carrot Weather

    Work

    • Outlook (work email and calendar)
    • Paycom (payroll program)
    • Duo Mobile (two-factor authentication)
    • Microsoft Authenticator (more two-factor authentication)
    • Microsoft Edge (browser of choice and search app)
    • Clipboard Fusion (shared clipboard with PC)
    • Jira (IT ticket system my dept. uses)

    Utilities

    • Drafts (rapid text capture and processing)
    • Launch Center Pro (launches actions through URL workflows)
    • Messages
    • Launcher (widgets on my home page)
    • Shortcuts (some automated)
    • PastePal (shared clipboard with personal Mac)
    • Camera++ (taking and editing photos)
    • Lastpass (password manager)

    News, Social Media and Entertainment

    • Threads (social media)
    • Blue Sky (social media)
    • Vernissage (for PixelFed)
    • Reddit (social media)
    • Inoreader (for RSS)
    • Google News
    • Micro.blog (social media)
    • Watcht (Trakkt app for TV)

    Mac People - I am mostly keyboard centric when it comes to launching and accessing apps but there are times when using the dock is just unavoidable. I’ve been using Ubar but it’s buggy. Just downloaded SpeedDock which is supposed to be like the late great DragThing. Anyone got any more suggestions?

    My Dataview Use Cases in #Obsidian

    One of the most downloaded community plugins in the Obsidian universe is Dataview. It allows you to treat you vault as a searchable, queryable database. Using the file properties and inline fields you can use Dataview Query Language (DQL) to ask questions of your vault. I use Things 3 for task management, so I don’t use Dataview to manage my todo list as many people do, but I do use it in for a number of other purposes.

    Help Building Queries

    There is a free tool you can use to help with the learning curve with Dataview. “The Basic Dataview Query Builder will guide you through some questions and put together a Dataview query based on your answers. You can use this query as-is in your vault or as a starting point to refine a more advanced query.

    The goal is to help you on your first Dataview queries and to give you a better understanding of the syntax and needed information to build Dataview queries from scratch.”

    Daily Note Template

    I have two Dataview queries in my Daily Note template. I have them formatted as callouts so that I can fold them up when I don’t need to see the information and therefore don’t have to do a lot of scrolling around.

    The first callout shows me the notes created on the same date the daily note was created.

      [!abstract]Today's New Notes
      ```dataview
      LIST WHERE creation-date = this.creation-date
      ```
    

    The second callout shows me the notes modified on the date the daily note was created.

      [!abstract]Today's Modified Notes
      ```dataview
      LIST WHERE modification-date = this.modification-date
      ```
    

    They appear like this in the note.
    Two callouts in the Obsidian app

    Maps of Content Based on Tags

    I have a folder of notes in my vault I call Meta. These are notes about other notes. Several of these contain a map of content (MOC) for my areas of interest. One of these contains my notes an a Mac automation program I use and that I study to improve my scripting skills, Keyboard Maestro. The Dataview query for a tag-based note looks like this:

      ```dataview
    
    	LIST
    	FROM #KeyboardMaestro
    	SORT file.name ASC
    	```
    

    Speaking of Tags

    I use tags extensively in my vault. One of my meta notes is a clickable list of all the tags I have. It’s like the tags pane in the Obsidian interface except it’s in note form. I can edit it easily enough so that It only shows me the notes from a certain folder if I want. The Dataview query for that notes looks like this.

      ```dataview
    
    	LIST length(rows)
    	WHERE tags
    	FLATTEN file.tags as tags
    	GROUP BY tags
    	SORT key asc
    	```
    

    The result is a list with the number of notes with that tag and a clickable link that will open a list of notes in the left pane.
    List of tags used in an Obsidian vault

    A Table with URLs

    Dataview lets you create tables with multiple columns as well as lists. I user URL as a field in my properties for several categories of notes. Since I’m relatively new to Obsidian, I have a lot of notes on different workflows and plugins. Once again, I have a meta note that contains not only links to my notes, but also links to the web pages where the information came from. The query is formulated like this :

      ```dataview
    
    	TABLE url  
    	FROM Obsidian  
    	SORT file.name ASC
    	```
    

    The result is:
    A list of Obsidian notes with internet url from whence they came

    A Little More Complex

    I work at a small private university. My role there causes me to interact with everyone on staff as well as the faculty and administration. I have a note for each person with details of out meetings and interactions. I also have notes in my vault for plenty of other people to include writers, vendors, my family and more. I need a MOC just for work though and the following query returns the information for people (criteria 1) who work at my university (criteria 2) and their role (criteria 3).

      ```dataview
    
    	LIST role
    	FROM #people
    	WHERE org = "MU"
    	SORT file.name ASC
    	```
    

    The result is
    A list of people who work at Methodist University and their titles

    Special Cases

    Not all my meta notes contain links to other notes. I have an collection of over 500 quotes in my vault. Some of them are from an app on my phone. others have been imported from other people’s vaults and some have been added one at the time since i started using Obsidian. One of the fields in the metadata is Topics: which I use instead of tags so as not to clutter up my tags database. Because I have notes from so many different sources, the topics field was a mess with different capitalization rules, punctuation etc. I needed a way to list all of the topics so that I could use a text editor to do a search and replace across my vault to standardize things. The user holroy on the Obsidian.md forum wrote the following query for me.

      ```dataview 
    
    	LIST length(rows)
    	FROM "Quotes"
    	WHERE topics
    	FLATTEN topics as topic
    	GROUP BY topic
    	SORT key asc
    	```
    

    The results:

    A list of topics from a collection of quotes

    See all my Obsidian Tips

    One of my favorite things about having a blog is the daily search for a link to share in my weekly bookmarks post that I put together on Saturday mornings over a cup of coffee. I try to find a link every day and I keep a note open in #Obsidian to collect the info. It gives my web surfing a purpose.

    I don’t see the cool kids (outside of Reddit) talking about #Raycast much. I used Launchbar for years and enthusiastically switched last November. Raycast just does so much: AI interface, image conversion, translation, posting to social media, emoji picking etc. Why do the intelligentsia reject it?

    All the Ways to Get Web Content Into #Obsidian

    An imac lit by purple light

    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!

    See all my Obsidian Tips

    I was today years old when I found out you can install fonts on an iPhone. Now I can use my beloved Atkinson Hyperlegible and JetBrains Mono in #Obsidian on mobile just like I do on my MacBook and Windows box. I use a free app called Fontcase I heard about from Mac Power Users.

    I’m still getting value here, even though I’m all in on #Obsidian, but damn, that’s a lot of dough for a note taking app. If it weren’t for the IFTTT integration and the mailto:Evernote functionality for HTML messages I’d be gone.

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