Obsidian
- BookFusion
- How we’re responding to The New York Times’ data demands in order to protect user privacy
- NYT vs. OpenAI
- Na prática, o plano gratuito do Evernote acabou
- Quantas pessoas usam o Obsidian?
- If you move that note to another folder in your vault, the page address will change if you update it. And the last thing you want is your site pages changing addresses.
- I’m not an SEO specialist, and there is conflicting information about this online, but some say the address format is an important signal. I have no idea whether it’s critical or not, but the address created by Obsidian Publish looks horrible.
- Wait for four hours before sharing the permalink on social media.
- Use the original link instead. That link will always exist, even if you create a permalink. Also, it doesn’t take four hours to show the image.
I’m finally down to a single template with every property I need, which greatly simplifies the process of creating #Obsidian Bases tables. 🫣 What about enough screen space for taking notes?
Obsidian and my two-blog problem hunting me since forever.
As you may remember, I have two websites: one in Portuguese and another in English. This is something I have to constantly take into account when looking for hosting, social media, and, honestly, almost any other online activity.
When I was using Obsidian Publish, I ended up creating /en and /pt sections in the same site, but that came with several problems back then and now. For example, Micro.blog offers up to a five-blog plan, but all the posts go to the same ActivityPub feed. That’s not ideal when the blogs have different topics or languages. So, when I decided to move back to Micro.blog, I opted for two different blogs, which immediately created another problem.
I use the Micro.publish plugin to post from Obsidian, and of course, it has to be logged in to my Micro.blog account, which is now two accounts.
The first idea I came up with to fix this was to create two new vaults, one for each blog. Technically speaking, that worked very well. But it didn’t take long to see how incompatible it was with the way I use Obsidian. My notes and files are all interconnected using tags, properties, and even links. For example, I might create a trip journal note and link that to a blog post, or use an image from a note in a post. The web of connection is so deep that when I moved both blogs to different vaults, it broke many links. So, I’m back to having both blogs in my main vault.
After giving it some thought, I came up with a workaround that, to be honest, is not 100% safe. Each site has its own directory in my vault, and my main Obsidian is connected to the Portuguese Micro.blog account. Then, I created a nested vault using the English site subfolder and connected that second vault to my other Micro.blog account.
Yes, that’s a recipe for disaster if one is not careful.
To make it less prone to making a big mess, I took some precautions. The second vault now has a red accent color to make it clear I’m in a dangerous zone. In addition to that, I changed the Default location for new attachments to Same folder as current file and the New link format to Shortest path possible.
To be entirely transparent, saving attachments in the same folder is something I started experimenting with a few days ago, when I went on a trip and only used Obsidian on my phone for 10 days. That was an experience in itself, as I noticed how tricky it can be to use the app on a phone 100% of the time, but that’s a story for another day.
Back to the multiple-blog problem. Yesterday, I posted a test from the second vault, and it worked flawlessly. This will be the second post from there, but this one has links, tags, and other potential failure points.
Anyway, this multiple-language situation has been haunting me since I started my first website back in 1997, and I believe it will stick with me forever.
Once I switched my site back from Obsidian Publish to Micro dot blog, I needed a way to make sure I had a copy of all my posts in #Obsidian. It would also be good to keep track of the progress of all the article and video ideas I have. After giving it some thought, I came up with a system that combines #Kanban and the Timeline System, and I’m excited about it.
Por que migrei para o #Obsidian?
O processo de migração do Evernote para o Obsidian não aconteceu de uma só vez. Foram vários detalhes que me levaram a esta decisão. Sendo o mais importante deles o controle sobre meus arquivos.
Tópicos Relacionados
Inscreva-se no Podcast, que, a propósito, continua em estágio experimental.
Careful. This can mess up your Obsidian Vault settings.
What you are about to read is a real story that happened to one of my clients recently.
Let me start with some context. This is a person who was an Evernote user and who recently switched to Obsidian. He contacted me to help him with his company’s workflow and also with his personal life organization.
We started with the personal life part, and as I was showing him how to set up the Timeline System, I was also sharing some Obsidian good practices. There was a lot to do, and that’s why I was gradually introducing him to the system and adding plugins as he needed them. All that to say that it was a bit frustrating for him to see everything going away so easily.
When he shared his screen, the accent color he had already changed was back to the default purple, all the plugins were gone, and there were other small problems here and there. I could clearly see that something had happened to the Obsidian settings folder, but when I asked if he had done something to it, he told me he didn’t even know about it. Just in case, I decided
The Global Search and Replace is yet another incredibly useful #Obsidian plugin that lets us find and change specific text in several notes at once. It really helped me with my most recent project, where I had to change a few details in so many notes.
The Multi Properties plugin was a lifesaver for my recent project (you know, that one 😉). It made adding and removing properties from several #Obsidian notes super easy. If you’ve been looking for a way to do that, I just published a video explaining exactly how to use it.
I finished importing all my #Obsidian #Markdown notes (posts) into Micro dot blog. Of course, there were some glitches and some problems I created myself, but overall it was as easy and simple as something like this gets. I took many notes along the way and had many ideas that I intend to share in a longer post and some videos.
One thing I would love to be able to do on #Obsidian would be to click on a file in the files list and then use the up and down arrows on the keyboard to switch from one file to another on the list. 🤔 Hmm, there’s probably a plugin that can do that.
My entire website was created using Obsidian notes, all written in Markdown. I already knew that Micro.blog supports Markdown, but when I started entertaining the idea of moving my site back there, I found out about the Markdown import feature, which uses the Frontmatter (Properties) for the post title, publication date, URL, and even tags.
After a few hours testing the tool with some of my posts, I was ready to start cleaning all of them, so I copied them to a new Vault. The Multi Properties and Global Search and Replace plugins were so useful that I’ll probably publish videos about them.
There are people who see Obsidian as a tool for developers, but when I find and use plugins like the above to perform complex tasks with a click of a mouse, what I see is a powerful tool making anyone’s life much easier.
PS. The website migration process is still in progress.
The more I share my ideas, the more ideas I get. I just made a small improvement to the Tasks system I created on my #Obsidian Home Page. Video coming up soon. Maybe today! 😉
It seems like you don't have to wait four hours like they said in the official Obsidian Forum.
After additional experiments with sharing the Obsidian Publish permalinks on social media, I discovered that if I do so two hours after the page goes live, the image will appear on the social media post. I haven’t had any luck with a one-hour wait, though.
Next, I’ll try one and a half hours 😉
UPDATE: So, it looks like my two-hour theory is a bit hit or miss. I’m adding this update because it took a bit more than two hours for the image on this one to appear.
My Obsidian Publish infinite loop. The saga of creating new problems by solving others.
It’s incredible how solutions can have a side effect, creating new obstacles. And I secretly love dealing with that challenge.
Like usual, I’m sharing something I just learned. But let’s begin with the issue. If you use Obsidian Publish to post your notes, the address of the page will be something resembling the path to the note in your vault, which creates two headaches.
The solution to both is adding your own address as a permalink, which Obsidian Publish allows you to do with a property:
permalink: /any-address-you-want
Long story short, all my notes have a permalink, but of course, that created a new problem. Do you know when we publish a link on social media and it creates a miniature with a thumbnail and some details about that post?
Obsidian Publish has some properties that you can use to tell the social media site where to look for that information: cover: or image: for the thumbnail and description: for the description. You can learn all about this on the Obsidian Help site.
That set me on a quest that led me to this Obsidian Forum post: “Pages with permalink take longer to have a social preview.” There’s a long conversation there, but here’s the TL;DR:
How to Find the Original Link
Open the Obsidian command palette, and type Publish: open in live site. That will first open the page using the original address and then switch to the permalink.
It’s too fast to see, but if you go to your browser history, you’ll notice that page appearing twice in the list. The older one has the original address. Right-click on it and copy the link.
Yes, I know what you are thinking…
I agree. It’s incredible how there’s always a side effect creating new problems. But don’t worry, you’ll be the first one to know when I find out how using the original address creates new complications.
Tweaking some Obsidian plugins (weekend housekeeping)
Yesterday, I spent some time adjusting the settings of two Obsidian plugins — Voicenotes and BookFusion. That inevitably got me thinking about how cool it is to have apps and services automatically send information to a centralized space. What’s even cooler is that even if Obsidian ceases to exist tomorrow, all the files will still be organized and available in my computer’s file system.
BookFusion
When making some small adjustments to what I showed in a recent video, I noticed that the plugin isn’t creating “Lists” in my vault. I even went back to my video and realized that this issue was already present back then.
Anyway, if you look at the images below, you can see, by the lighter green link, that the notes “Completed” and “Currently Reading” don’t exist in my Vault. In other words, the plugin isn’t creating them, even though I have all “Index” options set to synchronize.
By the way, if you’re having trouble understanding what I’m talking about, please watch the video below.
Looking at the images below from my BookFusion dashboard, you can also see that the book Caliban’s War is in the “Currently Reading” list and the three others are in the “Completed” list.
It’s possible I’m doing something wrong, but after checking all settings and not being able to figure out the problem, I decided to email the BookFusion team. I’ll update this post when I hear back from them.
Voicenotes Unofficial Plugin
I’ve been testing the Voicenotes Pages feature to produce a video about it, which is why I decided to also dedicate some time to make adjustments to the plugin settings.
Again, I’m not sure if I’m the one doing something wrong, but it looks like the variable that creates the title for the note is also including the date.
Then, there’s a suggestion. As you know, I like to have all my files in the Files folder in my Timeline, but the plugin doesn’t let us choose where to save Voicenotes attachments. My suggestion was to allow us to do that.
That’s it for this one. I just wanted to share the recent updates because, as you know, I’m always tweaking things around here.
Experimenting with Voicenotes integration into Obsidian blog
Note: Originally posted on my Voicenotes Page.
I’m using the unofficial Voicenotes plugin in Obsidian and I have it set to download everything. Not only the text but also the audio, the attachments, everything. I even have some properties that will capture links, the title, and a lot of other information.
So, I’m here thinking that maybe it is possible to create a copy of this post—that I’m adding to Voicenotes Pages—in my Obsidian blog.
Well, it’s not “maybe”, it is indeed possible because, ultimately, it’s also being created as an Obsidian note. All I have to do is set the plugin’s template to download the post and everything else but with the appropriate properties, the ones that I use to publish on Obsidian Publish.
Hmm, this is an interesting experiment. Let’s see how it goes.
I created my own AI, but it is not what you are thinking.
As I’ve said many other times, I believe there are some technologies that reached a stage of maturity where they could just be used indefinitely. What many people seem not to know is that it’s possible to go back to enjoying that sweet spot.
If we look back a few decades, it feels like things eventually got out of control. I remember using the iPhone when information and even the OS upgrades were done by connecting the phone to a computer. Back then, apps with online synchronization like Evernote were rare.
At some point, everything started becoming so fast and instantaneous. Not only messages, but almost everything. I’m not old enough to remember when breaking news used to be the next day’s newspaper cover. But before the popularization of the Internet, I remember the We interrupt this program for a special news bulletin message on the TV and radio. Now, we get flooded by information about everything all the time. Many times inaccurate or, worse, fake news.
If we stop to think about it, unless you are a reporter, stock trader, or work with anything that is time-sensitive, there’s no practical use for all this immediacy. On the contrary, it generates a lot of stress. As ordinary people, there’s absolutely nothing practical we’ll be able to do with most of the instant information we get bombarded with.
The most recent I-must-be-part-of-it-no-matter-what fad is AI. There’s no reason to use AI for everything, nor is there a need for AI in every single app. Also, just so you know, yes, I do use AI. Every day! But I try to keep it siloed.
Back to my point. Although using or repurposing old tech was something I always did, it feels like I’m doing it more and more these days. I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older or because I refuse to subject myself to imposed anxiety.
For example, I did try streaming for a while but |never stopped using my iPod 5.5 Gen. The modern Supernote I use and love is constantly bringing me back to a pleasant time when I used my Palm for everything. You’re probably aware of my Digital Caveman project. And there are all those apps, like Instapaper, that look and work just like they did a billion years ago. All these are great examples of the point of ‘tech maturity’ I mentioned at the beginning.
Anyway, the more I look at modernity from the perspective of people who are constantly anxious and chasing novelty just for novelty’s sake, the more I think of products and services I should have never stopped using. The good news is that many of them still exist, and after going back to using some of them, I can now clearly see how good they really are, as they have withstood the test of time.
Maybe that’s why I related so much to Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants book. Not only does he directly challenge the common perception that old technologies become obsolete and vanish, but he comes up with several examples of technologies, no matter how old, that still exist somewhere. Perhaps in a modified form, for a specific purpose, or in a niche market.
Of course, using old tech or new tech with old tech vibes, like Obsidian, comes with its challenges. It often demands what I call Attention & Intention, my kind of ‘AI’. For example, I see people complaining all the time about how complicated Obsidian is. It’s difficult to disagree with that, but doing things with Attention & Intention means that you were paying attention and will probably remember where you stored that information.
I’m not going to pretend I didn’t fall for modern tech promises, like social media. Thankfully, many years ago I started disconnecting from all those toxic spaces, and recently, I’m finding that going [[vladcampos.com/Timeline/Blog/2025/2025-06-28 • A few cool things I recently discovered about RSS feeds. Spoiler — they have super-powers.|back to using RSS]] to follow blogs is bringing me a lot of joy. I don’t have words to describe how pleasant it is to read like this. I’m overwhelmed by how much great content I was missing.
Of course, it’s not as simple or easy as the infinite scroll provided by a mysterious algorithm with a single mission: keep you hooked, no matter what. No matter what! It comes slowly from here and there: from a conversation you had on Mastodon, a page that appeared in a search result, and even trying to remember the names of the websites of those old friends. But since it’s all done with Attention & Intention, it pays off.
It’s true for all the other non-anxious tech I mentioned above. Adding music to an iPod means connecting it to a computer. To find music, you have to know at least a few things about it, like its name, or the singer, or album, etc. As for the Supernote, it has a simple OS running on a basic device with a monochromatic display. No browser, no notifications, and disconnected most of the time, much like my Palm used to be. And let’s not even start with all the effort one has to put into an Obsidian Vault.
Next in my wishlist of mindful devices is a Fairphone, most likely running /e/OS.
Attention & Intention is beautiful, pleasant, and, most importantly, relaxing.
Refining my note-taking workflow—lessons from Evernote for Obsidian.
As someone who believes that serious note-taking needs a solid system, I’ve frequently encountered a challenge: effectively managing my ever-growing collection of notes.
Dynamically switching between multiple views of the same information is a strategy I used a lot in the past. However, I lost that when I moved to Obsidian, as I find its handling of lists of notes less intuitive than Evernote’s elegant approach.
I can’t think of any note-taking app that handles note lists quite like Evernote. Its “All Notes” list is essentially a dynamic filter displaying all your notes. If you’re an Evernote user, you’ve likely noticed that the list automatically refines as you click on notebooks, tags, and so on, transforming to show exactly what you need. This brilliant method of listing notes is something I truly miss in Obsidian.
When you select a notebook, tag, stack, etc. in Evernote, the items in the list are filtered to show only notes within that group. So much so that you can easily replicate this filtering using the advanced search operators.
For example, typing tag:tag-a in the search box yields the same list as clicking on the tag-a tag. Evernote’s AI-powered search functions similarly; the displayed items adjust based on the elements the AI selects to create the filter.
In Obsidian, however, filtering notes by a tag or using the search box will also list the items, but I’m limited in what I can do with the results. While I can clearly see the list, there’s no way to select all items and, for instance, add a tag to them or move that group of notes to a different folder.
In Evernote, this is not only possible but incredibly easy. You just select and move them to another notebook. While a limit on the number of selectable notes exists now, it wasn’t there before Evernote 10.
This clever way of displaying notes does come with technical challenges, though. For example, I believe the current selection limit was imposed because, in the past, moving long lists often led to significant conflicts.
Because there’s no easy way to filter notes in dynamic lists like in Evernote, I opted for subfolders within my Timeline System in Obsidian. But by doing so, I sacrifice a true timeline of my life’s events, as each type of information is located in a separate subfolder.
I haven’t tested Bases yet, but judging by the official documentation, it appears there’s no limit to the size of lists a Bases file can handle. If true, I’ll finally be able to build a real timeline by creating a single Timeline.base file that lists everything from the subfolders within my Timeline folder. Not only that, but I’ll have access to various dynamic filters within that Timeline.base file.
While I’d prefer not to, if the number of files proves too large for the new Bases feature to handle, I can always split it into yearly files: 2025.bases, 2024.bases, 2023.bases, and so on.
It will not be a perfect replacement for Evernote’s list of notes, as I will not be able to select multiple notes to add tags, move them elsewhere, and any other bulk action. But I’ll at least, have a real timeline and multiple possible filters.
The Bases feature is still in beta, and online discussions suggest the final public version will take some time. Meanwhile, I can ensure my Timeline notes have all their properties populated with the proper data, allowing my Timeline.base to beautifully simulate the visual effect of multiple views of the same list, just as I was accustomed to in Evernote.
Ultimately, my goal with the Timeline System is to create a note-taking system that truly adapts to how we think and behave, allowing us to interact with all the information we deal with in a fluid, intuitive way. Bases seems to be a promising step in that direction regarding using the Timeline System in Obsidian.
What about you? Any plans for the new Bases feature?
Como uso notas com tarefas no Obsidian
Um exemplo do dia a dia em que eu precisava juntar alguns documentos e depois solicitar outro documento via correios. Onde foi que guardei os documentos no Obsidian e como estou controlando o tempo de resposta via tarefas em uma nota.
Conteúdo Relacionado
Things you should know about Obsidian Publish — my struggles and how I'm dealing with them.
Obsidian Publish has been a game-changer for my online presence, but like any powerful tool, it comes with its quirks. Here are the hurdles I’ve faced and how I’m overcoming them.
A few days ago, I converted my blog to the Timeline System. If you are interested in more details, there’s a walk-around video that you can watch.
Photos Page
The “Photos page” was inspired by how Micro.blog handles our pictures. When there’s a JPG image in a post, that image will be displayed in a Photos page with a link back to the post.
My solution is more manual, like many other things on the website, but that’s okay. As all this AI buzz grows, I’m trying to find comfort in actually doing things with my type of AI in mind: Attention & Intention.
But don’t get me wrong, I use AI, the other type, all the time. For example, I had this long conversation with Gemini to help me come up with the CSS responsible for the /photos page layout.
Obsidian Publish Limitations
I am delighted with the progress I have made thus far. However, I have also encountered a few bugs and issues during the process.
Since I came back to Obsidian-Publish, I’ve been working hard on creating this mix of a blog and learning center. It has to be something useful for you, but, at the same time, I need a system that will make my life easy. Otherwise, I’ll just stop sharing.
You know that thumbnail when people share posts on social media? There’s a way to set an image to do that on Obsidian Publish. Although it’s a fairly straightforward setting, I never found it to be successful. And because of all the other work going on in the process of building my website, I never took the time to report this and investigate the matter.
Yesterday, I finally reported it on Obsidian’s official forum, which ended up leading me to mxstbr’s post about it.
The problem is some sort of incompatibility with the Permalink setting. I tested it on my website, and he is right. So, let’s hope the Obsidian team comes up with a fix to this.
The other issue is a site behavior that, in my opinion, doesn’t make any sense. As you already know, formatting notes in Obsidian is done with Markdown. But it’s also possible to use regular HTML.
What I found out is that any link that points to an external site will open that site in a new tab. First, I thought that I could solve that using a HTML link, but it keeps opening on another tab even if I use target="_self", which is a way to force the link to open on the same page.
After almost going crazy, I decided to inspect my website code, and, to my amazement, Obsidian Publish replaced the target="_self" with target="_blank", which is how we tell the browser to open the site on a new page.
Why? That doesn’t make any sense. We, the site owners, should be the ones deciding where the page should open.
Anyway, there’s also a complaint about this on the forum. So, let’s hope they fix it. For now, be aware that that’s the reason you’ll be sent to another tab when you click on one of my pictures on the Photos page.
No rel=“me”
This is another HTML attribute that is used by Mastodon and other services to make sure the owner of the website is the same person claiming to be that owner on another site.
It’s such a simple and easy setting, but because of the way Obsidian Publish code works, the rel="me" is not visible, and services cannot use it to verify ownership.
I’ve been complaining about this for a long time, but after being ignored for so long, I decided to come up with a workaround. Because I also needed a Linktree-style page, I created social.vladcampos.com on GitHub and that’s where I included the rel="me code.
Not everyone has time or knowledge to do this, not to mention that it’s not ideal. An official way to solve this would be to provide us with access to the <head> of the site via a file, just like we can do with the publish.css and publish.js files.
That, by the way, would address another issue. The Author Attribution verification. For that, regrettably, I could never come up with a workaround.
The Terrible RSS Feed
Finally, there’s the terrible RSS feed. I can relate to the challenges here, but there is already a feed, which, unfortunately, doesn’t make any sense. For starters, I don’t understand what the criteria used to order the notes are. If they could at least make it ordered by last created note, it would already be at least usable.
The workaround I came up with was to |manually create my feed. Unbelievable, right? It’s 2025! Anyway, I’ll do it again on my GitHub page and share the link on my Obsidian site and on the Linktree-style page.
But, please, don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled with what Obsidian Publish is enabling me to do. It’s something I have tried and failed on so many other platforms, and it’s now a fascinating work in progress.
Caliban's War
When was the last time I read a fiction book as quickly as Leviathan Wakes I don’t even remember. Even before finishing it I bought Caliban’s War, which I’m also enjoying very much. But this time I’m reading it on my Supernote.
I started reading it using the Supernote’s ePub reader, but after learning about the amazing BookFusion plugin for Obsidian, I had to install the BookFusion app on my Supernote, and that’s where I’m currently reading it. By the way, a video about all these tech adventures is coming soon.