2021-04-17: RSS Tips, Self-Publish, & Debug Tools

Community Events

• The second half of the community talk for how to leverage the Dataview plugin is now available on YouTube. You can vote for which upcoming community talks you're interested in on the forum.
• @nickmilo & @skepticmystic are hosting @blacksmithgu, the creator of the Dataview plugin, on a community Zoom meeting today (2021-04-17) at 10am PST. Details are here in the Discord if you're interested.
• Wanna join a fancy book club? @ryanjamurphy (he/him) and @bri (they/m) are hosting the first book club session for Knowledge Architectures by Denise Bradford on April 25th 11-12ish PST on Discord.

Plugin News

• The outliner plugin now lets you click on bullets to zoom in!
• The music notation plugin renders music sheets from code blocks using the music-abc language.
• There was a nice discussion initiated by @pjeby about some under-loved plugins that blend so well into the UI that you might not even known you need them, for example Tag Wrangler, Hotkey Helper, and Pane Relief.
• @alex.dinu published an initial version of a plugin that performs table sorting; it works with dataview but is not yet in the community plugins list.
• From a plugin security perspective, this discussion about how Obsidian has the ability to blacklist / disable plugins that are identified to have issues or vulnerabilities was very reassuring.
• @mgmeyers updated the Style Settings plugin to give better error reports, which is always useful. The repo also has This CSS Snippet can be used to adjust every CSS variable of the default Obsidian theme.

For Developers

• @Liam shared his approach to mobile debugging on iOS. Plugin developers will need to add this script to the plugin.
• There is a now a method for developers to write test cases that interact with a running obsidian instance.

Feature Requests

• @Murf requested a search operator similar to YAML similar to the line section. As Dataview becomes more popular and better-understood, this will probably become more valuable, so if you have a use-case or want to advocate for this feature, please reply to the forum thread.

Workflow Stuff

• For folks using MacOS, @benhamilton figured out a workflow for using icalBuddy, a script, and a keyboard macro to list events from a ical into a daily note.

Tips & Tricks

• PDF tip via @cotemaxime: you can embed a specific page of a pdf with ![[My File.pdf#page=number]]
• If you're using a sync service that doesn't let you opt out of syncing a particular folder, there is a setting in Obsidian that will let you override where that particular instance of Obsidian pulls its configurations from: in About -> Advanced -> Override config folder. This is also helpful if you've got access to the mobile beta and want to differentiate settings from your desktop config.
• u/aviranco on Reddit asked how to restyle checklists to not change the display of subitems under a completed task; the community came through with a CSS snippet.
• If you like the idea of being able to zoom in and out to various tiles on your Obsidian workspace, @Licat put together a CLI snippet that could be extended into a nifty plugin by an enterprising developer!
• In base Obsidian, footnotes mess up the line height and make paragraphs look not-quite-right from a spacing perspective. But @Klaas has a fix on their GitHub snippet repository.
• There's a mobile emulation flag in the desktop app that will let you check your CSS and whatnot before moving it over to mobile.

PKM Tips

• We had a discussion about how to adapt the concept of a Resonance calendar from Notion to Obsidian in order to help bridge the gap between "collector's fallacy" and "forgetting where you read something and not being able to find the reference again."
• There was an insightful discussion of when to use a "task in a page" vs "tasks in a list" structure in the discord.

Ancillary Tools

• We had another discussion of the Onyx Boox and how nice it is to have Obsidian mobile open on one half of the screen, with a PDF or epub on the other half, and take notes directly into Obsidian with either handwriting, voice, or keyboard inputs.
• It's possible to get the raw list github merges for plugins & themes as an RSS feed if you don't want to wait for the weekly newsletter but also don't want to hang out in the Discord.
• You can also get a direct RSS feed from the discourse forum from a tag or a category, for example if you just wanted to follow the community talks RSS.
• For Static Site Generators, there was some discussion about Hugo vs. Jekyll, and this forum post about how to self-host your obsidian notes as a digital garden still proved useful. We also talked about how to get a newsletter with Hugo if you're more comfortable with the technical side of things.
• During a discussion about whether Sync is a viable backup solution for your Obsidian vault (possible but not recommended), Tarsnap was mentioned – it's billed as "online backups for the truly paranoid."

Housekeeping

I'm blown away by the interest & support the newsletter has already garnered! I really appreciate you guys covering my server costs. 💜