Tag: obsidian

I realised I had an ical file of all my appointments from the period I used Google Calendar from January 2008 when I started as an independent consultant, until February 2020 when I switched to the calendar in my company’s NextCloud.
I never search through that file even though I sometimes wonder what I did at a certain moment in that period. After a nudge by Martijn Aslander who wrote on a community platform we both frequent about back filling his daily activities into Obisidian for instance based on his photos of a day through the years in his archive, I thought to import that ical file and turn it into day logs listing my appointments for a date.

I tried to find some ready made parsers or libraries I could use in PHP, but most I could find is aimed at importing a live calendar rather than an archived file, and none of them were aimed at creating an output of that file in a different format. Looking at the ical file I realised that making my own simple parser should be easy enough.

I write a small PHP script that reads the ical file line by line until it finds one that says BEGIN:VEVENT. Then it reads the lines until it finds the closing line END:VEVENT. It then interprets the information between those lines, lifting out the date, location, name and description, while ignoring any other information.
After each event it finds, it writes to a file ‘Daylog [date].md’ in a folder ./year/month (creating the file or appending the event as a new line if the file exists). It uses the format I use for my current Day logs.
Let it repeat until it processed all 4.714 events in my calendar from 2008 to 2020.


A screenshot of all the folders with Daylogs created from 2008-2020


Screenshot of the newly created Daylog for 20 February 2008, based on the appointments I had that day, taken from the calendar archive. This one mentions a preparatory meeting for the open GovCamp I helped organise that year in June, which kicked off my work in open data since then.

Bookmarked a message on Mastodon by David Speier

David Speier is a freelance journalist who researches the German far right. In this thread on Mastodon he describes the work they’ve done to check statements from interviews with a former far right member, and to connect them to other source material (photos from events, other people, reports etc.). Of interest to me here is that they used Obsidian to map out people, groups, places, events and occurrences, to verify, to see overlaps and spot blind spots. Nice example of taking something that is inherently text and image based and use Obsidian to ferret out the connections and patterns. There are some topics that currently pop-up in my work in very different projects, and more purposefully teasing out the connections like in this example seems a useful notion.

In einer #Obsidian-Datenbank haben wir Kontaktpersonen, Gruppen, Orte und Ereignisse zusammengeführt. Mehr als 70 umfangreiche Belegdokumente untermauern die einzelnen Aussagen von „Michael“

David Speier

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I’ve created a small Alfred workflow to find a note name (folderpath/filename.md) in my Obsidian vault, and put it in markdown as link ([[filename]]) on my clipboard. It’s available on github now. If you use both Alfred and Obsidian (or some other markdown tool), it may be of use.

The use case is this: I annotate webarticles in hypothes.is. Those annotations end up in my file system in markdown where I use them in Obsidian. Therefore it is useful to me to link to existing Obsidian notes while I’m annotating, and not leave that until I encounter the annotation in Obsidian again (see an example). That way an annotation is already linked to some existing material, and not a lonely note in my collection of clippings. Having links in annotations at the same time increases the likelihood I will encounter them again naturally as I interact with my notions.

Until now I did this by searching in Obsidian and then copy-pasting that into hypothes.is adding the [[ ]] mark-up for an internal link.

This morning Frank mailed me to ask about my links in annotations. While I answered his mail I realised it would be easy to put the search and paste into an Alfred workflow, so that I don’t need to leave the browser/hypothes.is interface to add a link to an Obsidian note. Thank you for the nudge Frank!

A useful tip from Nicole van der Hoeven that I adopted in the past days: using the title of a note also as a linked heading inside the note. Especially since the change in Obsidian that de-emphasizes the title of a note in the interface. My note titles are meaningful, Andy Matuschak style, and usually result from writing the note or from writing another note from which it branches off. (My titles also contain a timestamp ensuring they’re unique and providing the ability to place a note in time. Example: “Optimal unfamiliarity 20040107122600”) Having it as primary header in the note itself means I will more likely think about improving the title when I develop the note over time.

Personally, I put the filename as a heading, but I also put it as a link. When I rename the file, the link (which is also the heading), automatically updates.
Nicole van der Hoeven

Screenshot of what that looks like in practice:


Screenshot of a note title optimal unfamaliarity with its title as a header linking to the note itself

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Web pages are predictably untrustworthy to remain online as they were when you dropped by to see them. They can change while their address remains the same, can redirect an address to someplace else entirely, and entire websites can disappear meaning there’s no response when attempting to visit an address.

This means that when I link to something here, there’s no guarantee at all that when you click such a link that you actually get to see what I thought I’ve linked to. And no, screenshots don’t help: fake is easy and we need to back up our words with hyperlinks.

The same is true for stuff I don’t link to here, but save to my archive. That’s why I don’t just save URLs but the entire article for future reference to my markdown notes. That still means the actual source might disappear, without me having a way of proving what I saved is what I saw. This not only is relevant to the content itself, but also for instance for licensing information. There are photos in this blog that were openly licensed when I used them, but no longer, leaving it impossible for me to prove I still can use the image because of the license at the time.

This makes an archiving service useful, like Archive.org. I can use that to store URLs I find interesting and I do that with some regularity. It is why I am a monthly donor to the Web Archive, I’d like it to remain a more robust reference point on the web.

Currently I have one way of adding web pages to an archive, using the Wayback Machine add-on in my browser. The same add-on helps me find previous versions of a page already archived, tweets about that page, and annotations made by others. Very useful, during browsing.


The Web Archive browser add-on bookmarklet

Writing blogposts and saving webpages as markdown in my local notes, or starting to annotate a page in Hypothes.is are another matter however. There I’d like to automate getting or creating an archive link.

In all cases it would need to be an archive link next to the original. If I link to something in a blogpost here I want to still send WebMentions to the linked site, and that requires the link to the original to be in my posting. Similarly for my notes, I want to have the original url as well, although it would be reconstructable from the archive link. For online social annotations in Hypothes.is, the original link is needed because that is how you find other people’s annotations alongside your own. The last one is probably easiest, by using the browser add-on manually and adding the result as a first annotation for instance.


An archive link as first Hypothes.is annotation

On the page in the IndieWeb wiki about using the Internet Archive there are some code snippets to be found to use with the Archive’s API, or using the basic string to save something https://web.archive.org/save/urlhere. It also mentions bloggers who either send the URLs they mention, or their own postings, or both (e.g. when sending a WebMention) to the Internet Archive.
When posting to my blog from my local markdown notes I could potentially add a function to the markdown-to-html parser I use where it detects external links, runs them through the Archive and writes the html for both the direct and the archived link.

For saving web articles as local notes in markdown there are several options to explore:

  • When saving from the browser using the Markdownload add-on, first saving and copying the saved url using the Achive add-on, then pasting that archive link in the dialog box.
  • Adding [Opslaan in Internet Archive](https://web.archive.org/save/{baseURI}) to the Markdownload template so I can directly save a URL from within the local note later, if wanted. I added this experimentally, to see if I would actually use it like this.
  • When saving to notes from my microsub feedreader I could add a function to the html-to-markdown parser I use there to run external links through the Archive and write the Archive link in markdown after the original link.