Obsidian

What is Obsidian and why should you care?

Obsidian is a great note-taking tool that allows you to capture your thoughts and put them into markdown (.md) format and look at them in a very pleasant and extensible way.

I personally have been using Obsidian for years for notetaking/journaling, especially when it comes to my homelab antics which I go into on this website.

I, in fact, draft all these posts in Obsidian and then have a much-too-complicated way to push the data to some nginx containers to use Jekyll to make this static site.

The power of Obsidian

Obsidian is what you make of it. There is not a huge amount of things it forces you to do and it is wildly extensible.

The main plugins I like to use are:

• Calendar - to prompt me to journal/capture my daily thoughts. I leave this up on the right of my interface full time
• Period Notes - Useful when combined with calendar (calendar shows when you have made daily notes and will prompt a new one when you click on a date)
• Templater - to have templates that rename new files to something consistent with a date-folder structure, and to make more complicated notes for tracking my YouTube production
• Natural Language Dates - helpful to insert current time for very busy days with single keystroke
• Excalidraw - Allows me to use my Wacom tablet to make flowcharts right in Obsidian, and to have them saved as .md

‘Backlinks’ between notes allows you to link things and you can also view them graphically if you so choose. I mainly like to keep track of all my projects and as I make progress ever day I can point back to when that was.

If you are into homelabbing at all, you should be keeping track of what you are doing (future you will thank you!). The pull to just walk away once you figure out a frustrating solution is real, but with obsidian I have saved myself easily hundreds of hours over the years just reviewing notes instead of figuring out the whole solution once again.

If you are interested in my current Templater templates, head on over to discord where I will keep updated versions