2021-05-01: Showcases, QoL Improvements, & Theme Updates
The Community Talks are ramping up, there were lots of great little plugin updates especially in the "importing things as markdown" space, and we're starting to see some organized writeups about workflows that utilize dataview and templater.
In The Community
- Obsidian Mobile is now available for all tiers of Obsidian Catalyst.
@Wace
will be presenting Notetaking for Community Students at 11:30 EST.- Voting for the date/time of the Leveraging Metadata and Bending Markdown community talk via
@tallguyjenks
is currently underway. - Voting for the date/time of the Deep Learning on Networks community talk by
@phnx
is currently underway. - Voting for the time slot of the Knowledge Organization, Cataloging and Classification in Obsidian talk by
@bri
is now open. - Templater now has a showcase on github where people can share useful templater scripts.
@Murf
also has some gists that seem like useful templater scripts.
Plugin News
Updates
- Imgur plugin v1.1.0 is out. You can now upload on 'drag-and-drop' which enables uploading gifs and multiple files.
- Page preview now works in Obsidian Kanban. You can also do "new note from card." There are settings for specifying a template and output folder for new notes.
@Santi Younger
put together a Youtube Video to explain how to get the most out of visual boards. - The Kindle Highlights plugin now brings in notes along with highlights. The developer is really responsive to requests and the plugin saw a lot of other quality of life improvements. There's an (unreleased) working prototype for importing from myclippings.txt as well, which will allow this to be used for books not officially connected to the Amazon account. Here's an example of the plugin in action!
@argentum
and@liam
released v0.5.0 of the Natural Language Dates plugin, with a keyboard-friendly date picker, improved date autosuggestions that use@
, and more.- The Extract URL plugin (which imports the contents of a webpage into a markdown note in your vault) now has special support for YouTube videos. It will extract the channel name and description as well.
Releases
- This plugin will keep the filename and the first heading of a file in sync. Straightforward, but convenient!
- Recall is a spaced repetition plugin that just entered early-release (manual installation required). It allows the use of different algorithms and lets you track or untrack notes. (Incidentally, there are now enough spaced repetition plugins that I added a section for them on the plugins roundup page).
@ryanjamurphy
put together the Enlightment plugin, which grays out things you aren't focused on. The pull request to get it into the community plugins list is pending.- Excalidraw, a full featured sketching plugin in Obsidian is now available in the community plugins list.
@mrjackphil
put together a plugin that will let you copy links from the file explorer or search bar as a markdown or wiki link (instead of just the obsidian URI), as well as the header from the first result of a search, which is pretty nifty. Requires manual install.@mrjackphil
also put together this nifty plugin to allow outliner-style zooming in on headers. It also requires manual install, but the directions are essentially the same.
For Developers
@ryanjamurphy
put together a guide on getting started fiddling with plugins.
Feature Requests
- There's a feature request for Obsidian to provide functionality similar to dataview with the inline YAML fields in core that is being discussed on the forums (there are pros and cons).
- A couple of people are interested in a way to hide YAML metadata in edit mode.
Workflow Stuff
Dataview
- Here's an explanation of how to Replicate Notions' tables with Obsidian.
@riddyrayes
also put together a writeup for how to leverage dataview for relational databases, so the possibilities here are definitely capturing people's imagination. @arminta7
has a useful description of why she likes dataview's new inline YAML fields functionality and how she uses it.@arminta7
also put together a writeup about how she uses dataview for processing media. It includes her roundup of related posts, such as how she uses dataview for tracking fitness, task management, and daily/weekly reviews. Her CSS is available here.
Academic
- for Apple: This DEVONthink, PDF, Bookends References, and Obsidian summary notes script/workflow by
@ryanjamurphy
got resurfaced. PS: DevonTHINK added support for Obsidian transclusions. @smithtjosh
was kind enough to share a guide they wrote in a professional capacity. It's aimed at college students doing research, but covers some useful stuff about customizing search engines, using zotero, notetaking in general, and more!@argentum
put together a bunch of really helpful notes with tips and tricks about Zotero.@cat
put together some nifty placeholders for Zotero that utilize Dataview's inline fields.
Tips & Tricks
Dataview
- Dataview allows for basic
if then
statements. Here's an example. - When you use
group by
in Dataview you also need to userows
—@SkepticMystic
explains it better than I can on the forum.
CSS Tips
- There's a new theme in town from the maker of
Obsidianite
: Aurora. @manedblackwolf
is working on adding link icons (i.e. for Twitter, YouTube, etc.) to the Spectrum theme.@death_au
put together a CSS snippet for differentiating different types of tasks/checkboxes (made possible in obsidian 0.12.0). There's a preview example.- If you want to be able to check off a 'parent' checkbox but not the 'child' checkboxes,
@CurioHeart
has a workaround that will allow something along these lines. @Mara
was able to use the clutter-free formatting CSS and the image-in-editor plugin to emulate WYSIWYG really well.- If you want to show specific languages in specific fonts, you can use the Unicode range descriptor to do so.
Publish
- There was a discussion about how to get a custom theme on a Publish site.
andrioid
put together a blog post about how to use Obsidian, Gatsby, and Nextcloud to self-host a blog written in Obsidian. It's fairly technical.
Ancillary Tools
- Story Graph was recommended as a Goodreads alternative that isn't beholden to Amazon tracking.
- For folx who don't trust websites to stay where they are, ArchiveBox bills itself as an open source self-hosted web archiver. It takes URLs/browser history/bookmarks/Pocket/Pinboard/etc., and saves HTML, JS, PDFs, media, etc.
Note: There are a couple of affiliate links & codes scattered around, but these always come from links I was already recommending and usually I share them because they benefit you too (i.e. getting you extra time on trials).
🌠 New Branding, LLM vs PKM, & improved keyboard control
Buttons needs a new maintainer, there's a new TTRPG community vault, & Tasks continues with fast-paced updates.
🌠 Recipe importing & Linting improvements
New themes, productivity Shortcuts for mac, and systems for pairing digital & analogue.
🌠 Conference Videos, Dendron support, & Improved Reference Counting
Showcasing teachers, authors, medical students, people impacted by LLMs, gardeners, and mathematicians.