Obsidian: The Good Parts
Added 2025-02-01 21:31:27 +0000 UTC(Follow-up explanation post here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/121717698 )
Like many of us, I suffer from a sickness.
I don't know what it's called, but left to my natural inclinations, I seem to spend all my time sharpening my metaphorical axes instead of using them. Not only do I end the day without cutting down any trees, but if this continues, I will have ground my axes down to nothing.
There is no one right way to build your Obsidian second brain, but there are WRONG ways, and these pitfalls are important to know about.
This video is about the good parts of Obsidian, those that if you know about, you can use to make your second brain as complex as your first.
---
Here's the final version of the video, thanks to everyone who asked questions or suggested tweaks - I've tweaked about 50% of the slides to be clearer, ESPECIALLY around the important [named:: links] section. I hope the changes work well, I'll be publishing the public video on Monday.
Thanks so much for your support,
Tris <3
Comments
Reasonable! Working with others is certainly a huge benefit of folders - the few places I am obliged to have folders are due to interface with external systems (the big one is the folder structure for https://www.namtao.com)
No Boilerplate
2025-02-18 11:19:04 +0000 UTCI agree with what you said for the most part, but I think your interpretation of folders doesn't work for me. I need structured content for my projects because some projects can contain 100's of notes, references, etc. Keeping everything related to that project within the folder allows me to pick it up and give it to another person when I need to. It is also easy enough to open up the right-hand folder navigation, click on the project, and see everything within it. I use a handy plugin called "Folder notes", which allows me to click on the folder and see an index, the tasks, and all the notes within the folder (data view) from a single note that is involved in that project. My System has evolved over the past year.
Peter
2025-02-17 22:18:53 +0000 UTCI was about to comment about 5:44 that sounds odd. The I realized it’s a bonus inserted at 2nd listen.
Renoir Boulanger
2025-02-12 01:26:25 +0000 UTCI'm delighted. There's a plugin called Auto Note Mover, that allows you to set up folders to move files to based on their tag. It works, but wouldn't you be happier just ditching folders ;-)
No Boilerplate
2025-02-06 15:10:55 +0000 UTCReally useful, thank you, and has helped cement some ideas I've been tinkering with recently. You're right about folders, and I've occasionally found myself in this exact trap with local backups, my NAS, and lately Obsidian. You briefly got me contemplating a plugin that would automatically write folder names into the metadata at the top of .md files… but thinking even one or two steps further suggests all sorts of failure cases. Instead of solving the inherent problems of folders, any such plugin would more likely reproduce them in the metadata. Folders always seem to create failure cases a database could solve: I take n-dimensional Stuff, and organise it into a folder tree that makes sense at the time. That schema inevitably has much lower dimensionality than the data I'm shoving into it, and eventually a new category or special case breaks it. Sometimes immediately!
David Hayward
2025-02-06 14:44:49 +0000 UTCI'm sorry I wasn't clear enough in the video, Links are 90% of The Good Parts, which implies that file names are also super important. Here's the part of the script I'm talking about https://www.namtao.com/No-Boilerplate/NB43---Obsidian-The-Good-Parts#linkslinks Did you check out the demo vault? I've set up a simple multi-part project in the hierarchy there https://www.patreon.com/posts/good-parts-vault-121361085
No Boilerplate
2025-02-06 14:02:44 +0000 UTCIt's never come up in my usage, partly because the names of my notes are often statements, such as "Story is an internal struggle not an external one" (an atomic note referencing a concept from Story Genius by Lisa Cron) But also I guess other notes often have long file names too? It's also partly that folders don't totally solve the duplicate name problem, because Obsidian will detect duplicate file names and add them to your link with an alias [[foldername/filename|filename]], which has broken the auto-renaming of links feature that I like so much in Obsidian. (very often I'll write in a new link with placeholder text like [[alice's mother TODO]], using it in multiple places throughout my note before figuring out the name for it.
No Boilerplate
2025-02-06 13:57:13 +0000 UTCIt's in a different post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/good-parts-vault-121361085
Bikaras
2025-02-06 04:22:35 +0000 UTCWhere would I find the obsidian template the video mentions ?
William
2025-02-04 22:27:21 +0000 UTCI am curious about actual file naming. By what I understand - we don't care about the actual name too much - just the tags. But at the same time, we want to use links between files to relate to them. That wouldn't work too well for journals I imagine - or would it be good enough to just have some naming convention? But that would, to a degree, duplicate tags system. For example, I want to create financial journal - where I document why I buy / sell something, how I feel about it, how to execute my plan etc. I would do it irregularly but it would make sense to have date when I wrote this as a reference. How would you tackle this? At this point I was thinking about just generating UUID as file names and use properties/tags for this sort of metadata but this seems just overcomplicated.
Mateusz
2025-02-04 18:01:38 +0000 UTCSeriously. Like he made some good points but left SOO much unsaid to the point it's impossible to apply anything
Colby Wright
2025-02-04 07:42:29 +0000 UTCI thing a follow up is needed. It's extremely hard to understand how in the world I can use these up/down and duck typing tags. Out of an experiment I removed a folder view and marked sub-project notes with up: [[ Project ]] tags. And now what? They show up in the bottom of the page, but that's not looks like in folders (but ugly formatted :/ ) Am I not getting something?
Undrilled9830
2025-02-04 02:19:44 +0000 UTCWhat is you strategy for avoiding name collisions without folders? I see in the breadcrumbs documentation that they support Dendron and Johnny Decimal, do you recommend either of those?
Dalia Rojas
2025-02-03 17:03:09 +0000 UTCI have one vault for everything, are you talking about the 'paste renamer' plugin? Very good for copy and paste, certainly. Using the 'attach file' command from the command palette works great for me, I keep everything in /attachments/. The more I keep in obsidian, the happier I am! (I sync it with Dropbox these days, now I've found Dropsync for android)
No Boilerplate
2025-02-02 21:01:37 +0000 UTCanother reason I use tags sparingly - you have to use the 'tag renamer' plugin to rename them!
No Boilerplate
2025-02-02 20:12:33 +0000 UTCHow do you handle pictures or other media? Do you store it within Obsidian? I find it clunky at best, even with the (forgot name) plugin that renames them for me.
Magnus Markling
2025-02-02 19:56:17 +0000 UTCHow does renaming of tags work? Is it automatic? Because as you mentioned, renaming a file (or its folder!) automatically updates all links in my "folder system".
Magnus Markling
2025-02-02 19:55:41 +0000 UTCMake those folders into notes, then use the [up:: [[link]]] notation to link notes that were in that folder to that 'parent'. Try the Breadcrumbs plugin, it's amazing. As for leverage, consider the Zettelkasten system (a good video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugxcbsgjEHI) - this lightweight system ALREADY has two different kinds of links: parents and siblings. Being able to navigate your links by type is essential for functioning, not even value-add, it's the basis of a semantic system
No Boilerplate
2025-02-02 15:30:17 +0000 UTCwikilinks are a first-class citizen in obsidian: auto-renaming only works on wikilinks. Also, personally, I prefer the ergonomics of the linked page being the link text by default. Github wikis also use this format, and there's great integration possibilities there, opening a gh wiki clone with obsidian!
No Boilerplate
2025-02-02 14:27:33 +0000 UTCAs someone who's more used to writing markdown than wiki markup, what's the advantage of the wiki-style links over markdown?
Jon Roberts
2025-02-02 05:15:22 +0000 UTCLoved it! Do you have any examples of the leverage you get from having everything in one place? Also, any tips for migrating from folders? I was thinking about generating tags based on folders with a script, then it won't matter where the files are after that, but I'm also feeling like I should go through everything once and do some metadata enrichment.
Tim Urian
2025-02-01 23:52:20 +0000 UTC
