Obsidian - A Beginning

Intro

I’ve generally just written my markdown in vs-code and called it a day. However, I started using Obsidian as a note taking app and thought, “maybe I could use it to manage my blog writing?” So, here I am. Writing my first blog entry using #Obsidian.

What Is Obsidian

Obsidian is a powerful note taking tool. It has a ton of functionality thanks to its healthy plugin ecosystem. However, before you even install a plugin it seems pretty useful. Its a clean and easy to use markdown editor.

Because my blog is written in markdown it is, at its core, a fine tool for writing new blog posts.

Considerations

To be honest, when you first install it if you don’t look at plugins, or templates, or anything else - it seems pretty simple. But its also kind of hard to dive right into because you can see all the available options, plugins, templates, etc and then it quickly becomes overwhelming.

I figure there are just a few types of people who stick with Obsidian. The first are people who really like taking notes and don’t mind the steep learning curve. I’m not a big fan of note taking so I’m not in this category (yet, maybe Obsidian will convert me). The second are people who like to tinker with tech stuff and want to understand how it all works. I’m more or less in that group. I’ve been hearing about Obsidian for quite a while via news feeds and it just keeps on popping up - so I decided to give it a try and saw the complexity as a challenge.

My initial reason for installing it and giving it a try was work. My job this year has gotten pretty complicated and, while I normally just track all the things in my head I felt like I was doing a disservice in my 1:1s with people by not taking notes before hand so I could provide better feedback, both to my boss and to those who report to me. I’ve only used it for two days so far but, as you can see, I’m diving in even further by writing my blog posts with it.

Who knows, maybe I’ll blog more if I’m in this tool frequently? Time will tell.

Plugins

I am using 4 plugins to start with on my blog side.

Templater

The built in template engine probably would have been fine but I started using templater on my work notes so decided to use it here. It basically helps me get all the metadata in place for each blog post and makes sure each file is named/placed in the right place without me having to muck around much.

More info on Templater

Meta Bind

This is overkill - but I wanted a simple button that I could click to create a new post. When the new page is opened, using the post template, Im prompted for a post title and templater takes care of the rest. Technically templater also asks for the name - but meta bind “fires off” the template. I have a lot more templates at work (1:1, meeting, person, journal, incident, etc) but for the blog its just the one, post. Again, its probably overkill but was easy to copy what i’d learned in my work notes into my workflow here.

More info on Meta Bind

Dataview

Not really useful other than on the page I have locally where I have the new post button I have a list of posts that have the “featured” flag checked. Helps me keep track of what I’m featuring and makes it easy for me to demote something out of that status.

This plugin is really cool for my work use case. I’ll probably share some more thoughts on this in a future post.

More info on Dataview

Git

Becuase this blog is hosted as a Github page I need to push my posts to github. I can easily do this via the command line but - I’m a programmer and thus, lazy. Why open the command line if I can push a single button to commit and push my changes? I can’t think of a good reason so - I use this plugin.

More info on Git Plugin

Summary

This post serves as a test of my use of Obsidian for this purpose. I will probably evolve my process. As figure out the best way for me to use it for work I’ll probably share “my system” and my templates so others (if anyone reads these) might benefit. For now, I’m exploring and learning.