2021-08-21 Paid Dev Opportunities & Time Tracking with Toggl

In The Community

• There was a Reddit thread about why Obsidian sync is great, and during the discussion @ruanviljoen helpfully shared this super useful from @curtismcshale that addresses how to evaluate which sync method you should use.
• @Chetachi will be giving the customizable workspaces talk today, Aug 21, 2021 at 12:30 PM Central Time. The talk will be a showcase of the newest updates to cMenu and Yin & Yang, namely, the setting for custom commands with cMenu and the color changing settings with Yin & Yang. She'll explain how a user can customize their menu bar and theme for their own needs.
• @shabegom is going to be giving a talk on the Buttons plugin on August 28. If you would like to get involved in community talks, you can find more information on this forum post. You can request talks, vote on which one should be next, and also offer to give a talk.
• @Nick_At_day is trying to put together some folks for mutual critique of Obsidian workflows as a sort of informal workshop environment.

Plugin News

New

You can manually install plugins that aren't in the community list by copying the main.js, manifest.jso and (optionally) the styles.css files into {vault}/.obsidian/plugins/{plugin-folder}. It can then be enabled like any other plugin (you may need to refresh the list first). Usually these files can be found at the GitHub repo under Releases. Note, though, that this is not as safe as waiting for them to go through code review.

• Tag Pane Preview isn't published yet, but it was shared on Reddit and it's pretty cool. If you click on a tag, it'll open a little dialog box with pages that use that tag.
• This plugin lets you use commands to toggle the sidebars of obsidian.
• Obsidian Anki Sync uses a different and more powerful markup based syntax for making flash cards.
• Luhman adds support for using 1a2b3c style folgezettels by letting users automatically create a new filename immediately "below" the current file, i.e. if you're on 1a2b3c it will create 1a2b3c1 or the next available sibling name. Incidentally, @Nick_At_Day put together a templater script to turn folgezettels into an easy-to-read outline format.

Updates

• Tracker v1.10 has a fancy new annotation mode for month view, different date format upgrades, and more.
• QuickAdd v0.4 has a bunch of API improvements, advanced settings, and more.
• Unfortunately, FreeDictionaryAPI  will be ending support for non-English languages soon. If you know any free APIs for non-English languages, please reach out to Philbr0, the developer of the Dictionary plugin. More details on github.
• The emoji shortcodes plugin has a dynamic Suggester now.

Under The Radar

• The plugin that automatically fetches a page title when you link to it got resurfaced this week.
• The Extract Highlights Plugin lets you create and extract highlights from a current markdown note in Obsidian onto your clipboard.

For Developers

• @arvn is interested in hiring (this is a paid gig!) experienced Obsidian plugin developers to create some plugins to make Obsidian more voice accessible. You can find more details in Discord.

Workflow Stuff

• @bianca_oli_per has a holistic academic workflow up over on Linking Your Thinking. It covers MOCs, LaTeX equations, Obsidian queries, PDF extraction and more.
• @ASRenner1 shared a video on Linking Your Thinking about how she uses Obsidian to provide a minimalist but organized workspace for her fiction and nonfiction writing process. It also had a nice section on something she got out of the LYT workshop.
• Remember, you can search for any heading or paragraph in your vault without knowing the file: [[## for headings, [[^^ for blocks.
• This guide serves as a quick how-to for switching between editing notes in Obsidian and Dragon-friendly word processors with full text control and without reaching for the mouse or keyboard.

Advanced

• @Chetachi shared how she uses tags to highlight her Readwise highlights in different colors as appropriate.
• @Christian put together a writeup for how he uses QuickAdd and Zotero to process pdfs with hotkeys. It's a little technical but it's a nice complement to the zotfile -> mdnotes workflow from Cat. Incidentally, the Zutilo plugin for Zotero allows you to assign hotkeys to zotfile & mdnotes commands.
• @Christian also shared a Toggl Track macro that uses the new Toggl Track plugin. More details in Discord. @Maximo shared their usecase for how Toggl helps them track how much time they spend on different projects. Note: the Toggl API got hinky so if you're using this plugin update to version 0.2.4 or it won't work.
• @Christian also shared a QuickAdd script to automatically move files with a certain tag into a particular folder. More details in Discord.
• This bash script from @Moonbase59 lets users use a hotkey to quick-copy text, HTML and images from the clipboard into a "Clipboard" note within your vault, without the need of opening Obsidian each time.

Feature Requests

• @Bibi53 is hoping somebody can help out with integrating the Antidote spellchecker API into an Obsidian plugin.

Appearance

• @Chetachi shared a snippet you can use to make the headers in Yin & Yang be a long background highlight and like everything she does, it's beautiful.
• @Mara updated her github repository of WYSIWYG snippets.
• For those who prefer a more retro appearance for their vault, here's the Win98 edition theme.

Ancillary Tools

• This guide explains the use of pandoc for markdown with Zotero pretty well.
• @Koechiliniana shared a ready-made Obsidian vault for the government-mimicing metagame Nomic,

Housekeeping

• I sat down to update and consolidate my various writeups about all the different pieces of my workflow and put them all in one place and instead wound up waxing philosophical about how notetaking really is like gardening for two thousand words instead, so oops but also if you're interested here's my philosophy of gardening, digital and otherwise.