2021-05-01: Showcases, QoL Improvements, & Theme Updates

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 use rows — @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.