🌠 Conference Videos, Dendron support, & Improved Reference Counting

In The Community

• The 2023 Linking Your Thinking Conference hosted several community members for chats and demonstrations, including but not limited to a fireside chat with the CEO of Obsidian, writing a novel in markdown with P.D. Workman, an inside look into the Obsidian book club, ways to use AI in Obsidian, and a guided tour of Readwise Reader.

Obsidian Updates

• Desktop Insider v1.3.1 made some changes that will impact themes, improved PDFs and Sync, added support for keyboard navigation to outlines, and fixed some issues with bookmarks and backlinks.
• Desktop Insider v1.3.2 allows for embedding YouTube and Twitter links, improved Live Preview rendering, added some  hotkeys, and fixed some search and file saving bugs.

Plugin News

New in Community Plugins

These plugins went through code review and are now available in Obsidian's plugin list. For the full list, check out the plugin stats page.

• Auto Template Trigger by @numeroflip  will automatically prompt for a template when creating a note.

Pending (as of Friday morning)

Note: Not all new plugins are available in the community list yet, as they need to go through code review first. You can manually install plugins that aren't in the community list yet by using the Beta Reviewer's Auto-update Tool. Note, though, that this is not as safe as waiting for them to go through code review.

• Chess Study by @chrislicodes  is a chess study helper and PGN viewer for Obsidian.
• Dendron Tree by @levirs565  adds trees for exploring Dendron notes.
• Link with alias by @pvojtechovsky  creates links and aliases in front matter of target document
• Flowershow by @olayway lets users publish with Flowershow directly from your Obsidian vault.
• HackerOne by @Neolex-Security  will fetch your bug reports from HackerOne.
• Auto upload image to lskypro by @NekoTarou  will automatically upload images from the clipboard to lskypro.
• SupSub by @wjgoarxiv  adds functionality to wrap selected text with (superscript) or (subscript) tags.
• Pronunciation Trumpet by @ncoquelet lets users listen the pronunciation of any word from the wordreference.com database.
• Azure Blob Sync by @notmike101  will sync notes to Azure Blob storage.
• Memos Sync by @hyoban helps users keep in sync with memos.
• Auto Anki by @ad2969 uses GPT to automate card creation for Spaced Repetition in Anki.

Updates

If you want a comprehensive list of what plugins updated this week, check out this plugin updates index by Ganessh Kumar.

• Advanced Paste v2.2.1 addressed a bug with the default paste command not saving pasted images in the attachment folder and introduced utilities like lodash, moment, mime-types, and saveAttachment to aid in writing custom transforms.
• Last Modified Timestamp in Status Bar now displays file creation timestamps and allows users to adjust the refresh interval for the 'last modified' timestamp.
• Linter v1.14.0 introduced two new rules, mostly involving spaces around lists and blockquotes.
• Linked Data Vocabularies now syncs with the refreshed bulk exports from the Library of Congress, providing users with access to the updated Library of Congress Subject Headings and related entries.
• Tasks plugin v3.7.0 added a feature that allows users to reverse the order of group headings.
• Strange New Worlds 1.2.0 adds breadcrumbs for contextualizing links inside previews and support for Obsidian's global excluded files, a counter for links to non-existent files, and two new frontmatter properties to control the visibility of SNW counters in canvas. The internal link engine has been reworked to be case-insensitive, improving the accuracy of SNW reference counters. Several bugs have been addressed, including styling conflicts.
• Note Auto Creator v 1.4.0 improved support for Templater and QuickAdd templates, and got some bugfixes.
• Omnivore Plugin 1.3.0 added new page types and variables, scheduled sync, and the ability to export the content of an entire article with the highlights indicated visually with markdown syntax.
• Obsidian Git v2.20.0 features the introduction of Line Authoring, integrating git blame into the editor.
• Obsidian Weaver 0.4.0 improved performance, added a search feature, got threading and nested messages support, a button for regenerating the assistant's last response, a context button for literal conversation or token waste avoidance, and more.

Betas

Note: these plugins have not yet been submitted for code review, and are being made available primarily for testing purposes.

• CSS Editor Plugin Beta Release (0.0.3) allows editing of CSS files in your vault directory, and creation of CSS snippets directly in Obsidian.

Appearance

• Here's a neat article about the pros and cons of dark mode.
• Prism 3.2.6 includes improved the styling for embedded audio elements and improved the PDF viewer experience.
• Shimmering Focus got a bunch of big updates including new toggle commands, support for bookmarks and longform, alternating heading colors, improvements to readability, and more.

Ancillary Code

• Here's an issue tracker in Obsidian based on a custom Dataview script.
• Here's how to use columns & custom callouts to get a nifty "previous" and "next" visual in your notes.
• Here's a method using Buttons, Templater and Dataview for new notes to inherit information from their parent notes.

Discussions

• Here's a discussion between Obsidian users Bryan Jenks & Omar Khafagy about personal knowledge management, neurodivergence, and Obsidian systems.
• This discussion on Twitter involved a variety of people's takes on anticipation of the capabilities of LLMs making it harder for people to be motivated to organize their notes and write.
• Here was a discussion about methods for getting Twitter threads into Obsidian in the wake of the Twitter API changes messing up some of the old methods.
• Here was a nice reminder that simple methods don't get a lot of limelight, but are very valuable... and also that different people have different priorities, and Obsidian can be used for either pure productivity or as a fun hobby. Here's a related discussion about avoiding burnout and the value of slowness.
• Here are some thoughts by someone who published their second book using Obsidian.
• Here's a medical student seeking advice for how to use Obsidian effectively, and an accompanying discussion.

Showcases

• Here's planning a garden with Obsidian Canvas.
• A year of math notes with some great advice for math students.
• Here's an example vault for teachers.
• Here's TFTHacker's new publish site, with a bunch of information about his plugins, experiments, and articles.

Opportunities

• The upcoming Linking Your Thinking workshop has scholarships open until the end of today. Each workshop, over 25% of students are on scholarship, a number they intend to maintain. If you are already interested in that "build a custom knowledge/creativity system" stuff, this may be of interest to you.