Tag: obsidianmd

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Gisteravond was de 6e meet-up van Nederlandstalige Obsidian gebruikers. Net als de editie van afgelopen december vond deze meet-up plaats onder de vlag van de Digitale Fitheid community en de KNVI (Koninklijke Nederlandse Vereniging van Informatieprofessionals).
De vorige keer was ik een van de facilitators, dit keer was de begeleiding in handen van Martijn Aslander en Lykle de Vries. Dat gaf mij gelegenheid meer inhoudelijk mee te doen, en dat was prettig.

Het recept was hetzelfde als wat Marieke van Vliet en ik de vorige keer improviseerden: aanwezigen droegen aan het begin een onderwerp aan, en vervolgens mocht iemand telkens iets kiezen uit de lijst (maar niet het eigen onderwerp). Zo komt een divers lijstje onderwerpen tot stand, en zorg je ervoor dat een bredere groep aan het woord komt.

Iemand vroeg of je Obsidian ook op een USB stick kunt draaien. Dat je je vault op een stick hebt, en dan op systemen waar Obsidian staat die kunt openen inclusief alle plugins etc. Ik stelde voor dat ter plekke te proberen, en het antwoord lijkt ja te zijn. Deed me denken aan de wiki-on-a-stick experimenten die ik lang geleden deed rondom het ‘patchwork portal‘, waarbij wiki’s met een lokale kleine webserver op een stick werden uitgedeeld waar anno 2005 nog geen of heel weinig internet verbinding was.

Ik was zelf benieuwd of mensen n.a.v. de PKM Summit in maart meer zijn gaan doen met de visuele technieken die Zsolt Viczián met zijn Excalidraw plugin toen liet zien. Met name was ik geïnteresseerd in of mensen bestanden tegelijkertijd als tekst en als visueel element gebruiken (hier uitgelegd door Nicole van der Hoeven). Twee deelnemers lieten het e.e.a. zien. Zelf heb ik een sneltoets voor het schakelen tussen tekst en visueel ingesteld, maar dat zag ik hen niet doen. Dat zegt me dat ze die switch weinig maken. Ik zal er zelf eens iets over schrijven in meer detail, met twee recente voorbeelden hoe dat waardevol voor me was en heel prettig en wrijvingsloos voelde.

Maarten den Braber was een van de aanwezigen die liet zien hoe hij bepaalde zaken in zijn workflow automatiseert, vanuit hetzelfde principe dat ik hanteer: geen dingen doen die uniek zijn voor Obsidian, je moet altijd ook met je platte tekst bestanden uit de voeten kunnen. Hij liet de PDF++ plugin zien, en die moet ik zeker eens onderzoeken en vergelijken met hoe ik momenteel Zotero gebruik.

Muhammed Kilic liet zien hoe hij over meerdere apps heen dezelfde tags, links en indexes gebruikt. Hij noemde daarbij hoe ik dat ook doe in mijn hypothes.is annotaties (links naar bestaande notes, taken, tags opnemen waardoor het in Obsidian meteen in context staat), maar liet zien dat hij dat ook in Zotero doet. Dat doe ik niet in mijn annotaties daar, en toen hij het liet zien vroeg ik me af waarom eigenlijk. Ik link wel vanuit Obsidian naar Zotero, maar in mijn annotaties verweef ik in Zotero mijn notes en tags veel minder. Eens over nadenken, en uitproberen.

Tot slot merkte ik dat het in een groepsgesprek als dit lastig is om min of meer standaard ook te laten zien wat je beschrijft. Je moet je dan maar voorstellen wat iemand daadwerkelijk doet, ipv het te zien. Voelen we ons kwetsbaar in het tonen van onze tools en werkwijzen? Het aantal malen dat ‘tell’ ook met ‘show’ werd ondersteund was daardoor beperkt, en dat is jammer vind ik. Voor een volgende keer zou het ook leuk zijn om in plaats van over aspecten te praten eens iets van ieders gehele implementatie te zien, en daar vragen over te stellen.

Had a good workshop from TNO this morning about data space connectors, but what also stood out was how well the flow was working in Obsidian for me during the session.

I started making notes as usual in Obsidian, and then the facilitator started building a visual map of how different elements of a data space set-up work together.

I quickly turned my note into a note that is also an Excalidraw drawing (I could also have started from the note/excalidraw template I have, but only belatedly realised I hadn’t done that). I drew my own diagram alongside the presentation.


A note that is also an excalidraw image at the same time

Then we started working hands-on with some software which had a web interface. Following the links I added in my notes, I opened that web interface inside Obsidian itself using the Surf plugin.
This allowed me to very quickly alternate between visual and text as well as online material, taking and adding screenshots etc, all without ever leaving my note really.


Browsing a software tool inside Obsidian

As this emerged I realised how smooth it felt.

From now on I will aim to prepare for such sessions as this morning in a similar way.

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Nicole van der Hoeven published one of her videos on using Obsidian on the topic of the ExcaliBrain plugin. The plugin is made by Zsolt Viczián, the same creator as the Excalidraw plugin which brings easy visualisation to Obsidian. I use Excalidraw within Obsidian with some regularity (I’m mostly text oriented).

It’s not mentioned in the video, but the ExcaliBrain plugin is clearly inspired by The Brain software, both in terms of types of links between notes, and how it shows them (even the placement of the little circles where links attach). The name suggests so too, and the plugin author names The Brain as source of inspiration in the github reposository. I used The Brain as desktop interface from 1997 until 2004-ish, and this plugin seems to bring The Brain as a visualisation layer to my notes. That alone is enough to try it out.

The plugin can both infer relationships between notes, through existing links, much as the general graph view in Obsidian does, but does so in a more navigable style. This I hope allows it to be used as a visual navigation interface to notes, something the graph view does not meaningfully, as The Brain so usefully did for me for a number of years.

You can also set explicit relationships by adding named links to your notes, for which it uses the inline data fields (yourfieldname::) that the DataView plugin makes possible. I already use that plugin so that’s not an extra step for me.
I disagree with Nicole van der Hoeven on her suggestion to comment out explicit relationships so that the plugin will visualise them but the note won’t show the links, except in edit mode.
The notes should always show all links I explicitly set, that’s the whole point of links.
Machine inferred links are a different matter, which deserve a toggle as they are suggestions made to me.
Links are my own and real work in my notes.

Setting explicit links (parent, child, friends ExcaliBrain calls them) is similar to how I already create links. When I write a new note I aim to link other notes in the way Soren Bjornstadt describes in a video of his touring his Zettelkasten. I make three links, if possible, from a new note. One to a higher level of abstraction note, one to a lower level of abstraction but more concrete note, and one to a related note at the same level. This creates ‘chains’ of 4 notes with a content-based implied order.

For example: a note on the role of public transport might link to urban mobility and the liveability of car-free city centers as higher abstration concepts, to a note on urban rail systems or bus networks as a lower abstraction level, to the German 2022 summer reduced fare scheme as an example, and to another communal public service like urban public internet as a same level but different type of note.

I strongly dislike the parent-child-sibling(-friend) vocabulary Excalibrain introduces though, as it implies an order of creation. Parents exist first, children from parents. This means for the way I described creating links in notes that abstract concepts come first. This is not how it mostly works for me. Abstract notions are often created from, intuited from, less abstratct ones. The scaffolding created by less abstract notes and concrete examples is what leads to them. Overarching concepts and insights emerge from linking lower level items. Thankfully the terms you actually use to denote such connections between notes can be freely chosen in the plugin settings. That is a design choice by Zsolt Viczián I greatly appreciate.

Nicole van der Hoeven in her run-through of ExcaliBrain also talks about this implied hierarchy, and mentions a higher level type of use, which is adding more semantics to links using the renaming options in the plugin settings. For instance to express lines of argumentation, and how material reflects on eachother (e.g. Note A reinforces / contradicts Note B). This is the type of linking that Tinderbox allows you to do visually too, which I’ve used a lot. She hasn’t used it that way herself yet she says, but suggests it’s likely the most valuable use case. I think that rings true. It’s where linking becomes the work you have to do yourself again, as opposed to lazy or automatic linking between notes.

I very much want to experiment with the ExcaliBrain plugin.


A screenshot after activating ExcaliBrain of the vicinity of a single note

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Here are some impressions of my increased usage of Hypothes.is, a social annotation tool, in the past few days.
I follow Chris Aldrich his Hypothes.is RSS feed, and his usage has been both a good example and source of learning in the past months, as well as a nudge to experiment and adopt Hypothes.is myself.

What follows is a list of some early impressions that I formulated earlier today in an email. I thought I might as well post them here.

  • I played with the API to get a grip of how I might interact with the annotations I make, and with those of others I’m interested in. Added the existence of annotations to my blogposts in WordPress through the API too.
  • The Obsidian plugin to get annotations into my notes is an absolute prerequisite, because I need those notes in my own workflow.
  • I find working in browser for annotations somewhat distracting and uncomfortable (and I need to remind myself that they will end up in my notes, I feel the urge to also download it directly to my notes.)
  • I try to add an Archive link to the annotated article as the first link. It is slowly becoming habitual.
  • I mention existing notes in my annotations when I make them in Obsidian. Because it is one context that is a matter of starting a link [[ and I have forward search through all note titles. In hypothes.is being browser based this is a bit harder, as it means switching tools to retrieve the correct note titles. They do then work when they end up in Obsidian of course. At the same time, in my earlier use of a markdown downloader I would just mention those associations in the motivation to save a link, which is worse. Hypothes.is sits in the middle of saving a bookmark with motivation and annotating in Obsidian itself.
  • I do have some performative urges when annotating publicly. Maybe they will disappear over time.
  • The firefox hypothes.is bookmarklet I use doesn’t seem to play nice with archive.org. There’s another I haven’t tested yet.
  • I notice that any public annotations are licensed CC0 (public domain). Not sure what I think about that yet. It’s a logical step as such, but I don’t fully see yet what it may mean for subseqeunt learning processes internally and further down the process of creating insights or outputs. Is CC0 also applied to closed groups (educational settings e.g.)? Private annotations are just that, and don’t have CC0, but then you miss out on the social aspects of annotation.
  • My thoughts keep wandering to interacting with hypothes.is without using it directly to annotate webarticles through the browser. Are there any tools or people who build on or share with hypothes.is using the W3C standards / API, but don’t necessarily use hypothes.is themselves? Or run their own instance, which should be possible? I suspect that would open opportunities for a more liquid experience between this blog, my notes, and annotated articles.

In reply to Publish Obsidian Documents to WordPress by Curtis McHale

I didn’t come across this posting at the time. As you say, having to log in every single time as well as having to send it already formatted raw HTML (and not the markdown one writes in in Obsidian), are drawbacks. XMLRPC is blocked by my hoster (part of their security decisions), and I have disabled it within WP therefore. I went with Micropub to publish from Obsidian to WordPress, around the same time as this posting. As notes in Obsidian are plain text files in the local filesystem, I run a local script outside Obsidian periodically checking for files marked for publishing. Using Micropub it can post such files, while turning markdown into html, to several of my WP-run sites, both as post and as a page. The latter allows me to add them to my wiki-like section of my blog. Just posting at the moment though, not updating.

To publish click the WordPress icon in your sidebar which will reveal a panel in the sidebar with a Publish button for you to click. Once you click the Publish button a window opens up with your username prefilled and asks you to fill in your password. The plugin … publishes RAW HTML on your site. … While this does work, it feels far from optimal to me. I’d love to see the option of pushing straight markdown to the editor.

Curtis McHale

For two years now I’ve read all my previous postings on a day, every day. Early next week I will start my third round through the archives. Today it is also two years since I started using Obsidian.md for my notes. All my little lists as E sometimes likes to joke about them (while increasingly making her own also in Obsidian btw). This morning I was reading a blogpost from a few years ago, and immediately two things stood out as concepts. They were just mentioned passingly in the blogpost, but this time they seemed more meaningful than their place in the original text suggested. Off I went down a little rabbithole, writing both notions up and connecting them to the current things that make them stand out to me now, and incorporating other references.

I find it rather amazing and awesome that I can return to my plain blogposts of old and have a new conversation with myself that way.

It also points to the importance of finding better bridges and connections between my personal notes and my blog in both directions. A more fluent going back and forth, while respecting the different spaces they form. For writing to my blog from my notes I have things well arranged now I think, but the other way and linking between them, less so. Something to think about.