biscotty

I recently published several articles here and elsewhere on using Obsidian’s native database functionality to increase focus and efficiency when working with the information in our vaults. Rather than using Obsidian as a souped-up word processor, we can abandon the file paradigm altogether and use Bookmark and Canvas for accessing, editing, analyzing and organizing our information.

Given the interest that the articles have generated, and the fact that the concepts may be unfamiliar to some, I thought it would be helpful to make a video demonstrating how it works in practice. It ended up being somewhat long, so this is the second part.

If you haven’t read the articles, this may be confusing as I don’t go into depth on the concepts. This isn’t really a how-to video, so it assumes you know your way around Obsidian.

The videos are available at:

My site:

biscotty's Workshop

Substack:

https://briancarey.substack.com/p/obsidian-nosql-workflow-part-1

https://briancarey.substack.com/p/obsidan-nosql-workflow-part-2

Medium:

https://medium.com/@biscotty666/obsidan-nosql-workflow-61b0d108df66

This is the last in a series of articles, including Freeing Your Thinking and Building a Knowledge Tree, where I talk about using Obsidian as a non-relational database. The main idea is to interact with information, not files, and Obsidian's core plugins facilitate this approach. I have talked about Search, Bookmarks, Unique Notes and Graph View. This article will describe how to use Canvas to create visual maps of content which not only present information in a clear, attractive and flexible way, but also allow you to explore and interact with your information. As usual, our goal is to obviate the need to open files.

In data science there is a motto "visualize, visualize, visualize." In the business world, information is commonly presented in the form of a dashboard to allow for visualizing data. A dashboard is a graphical user interface containing views of information. Aside from providing graphical elements and views, a dashboard will typically provide navigational tools and other ways to interact with information and even edit information directly from the dashboard.

The full article can be read at:

My site: biscotty's Workshop

Substack: https://briancarey.substack.com/p/dashboards-with-obsidian-canvas

Medium: https://medium.com/@biscotty666/dashboards-with-obsidian-canvas-2b86c024412e

Bookmarks are the key to effectively using Obsidian as a non-relational database. The virtues of approaching your notes this way are several, and I covered some in Freeing Your Thinking. In this article, I explore using Bookmarks to construct flexible, interactive Knowledge Trees to organize the information in your vault (not the files).

The article describes a system consisting of three domains: Living, Learning and Creating. The tree is built entirely on bookmarks, and consists primarily of views (saved filters/queries) of my data organized in nested groups.

You can read the article in these places:

• biscotty's Workshop
• Substack
• Medium

If you are like me and use in-line (double colon) fields more than YAML, the improvements to metadata management (Properties) wasn't much of a help. The new filter syntax, ["key":value], and the glob version, ["key":], don't search in-line fields.

Of course, this isn't unexpected. Obsidian, for what I'm sure are good reasons, resists embracing in-line metadata, even though it is very widely used. Oh well, hope springs eternal... Nevertheless, though I've tried many times, I can't give up on the convenience of in-lines.

Because in-line fields use two colons, which do not appear together in ordinary writing, it is easy to filter for them. For a glob filter like ["key":] in the new Properties, you can simply use "key:: " to achieve the same effect, querying in-line metadata instead of YAML.

Filtering for specific values is a little trickier, because we must take into account multi-value fields. Fortunately, Obsidian allows us to use regular expressions in filters, and a simple one will achieve our goal. To use regular expressions, use the slash, /, as a delimiter instead of ". (In the example above, we actually could have used /key:: / instead of "key:: ".)

In regular expressions, a period, ., matches any character, and an asterisk, *, indicates that there can be 0 or more of a character. By putting the combination .* before the value that we are filtering, we are saying that there may or may not be other characters between the field name and the value being searched. In other words, there may be multiple values.

So, even if the value we are looking for is one among many, to search for a specific key/value, you can use /key:: .*value/, which does the same as ["key":value] does for YAML.

Obsidian at biscotty's Workshop

Supercharged Property Management

With the release of Obsidian 1.4.5, many people’s focus has been on metadata, which Obsidian calls Properties. I have written a series of articles on using Obsidian’s natural database features, and my entire workflow depends heavily on metadata. Naturally, I was anticipating this release with some excitement, having seen some previews on YouTube.

I was frankly disappointed. It is movement in a positive direction, and has some very nice features for managing metadata. However, its insistence on YAML for properties when many users such as myself prefer in-line metadata for its flexibility, makes some of its features useless to me.

Another reason for my disappointment, or feeling underwhelmed, was that I had already discovered a truly amazing plugin for managing metadata which did everything I need and more. Metadata Menu, a Community Plugin by mathieu, provides a full set of features for managing properties. It has a modal, available in multiple places, which allows you to manage literally all aspects of a file’s metadata without opening the file, perfect for my workflow. It even has a file class template system which supports nesting groups of metadata fields. Fields in tables can have actions, allowing for direct editing of metadata in the table itself using standard widgets. And, it is visually clean and attractive.

This video isn’t a guide to using Metadata Menu. Rather, it’s to show off some of its features. If metadata is important to you, you must check it out.

Video:

• biscotty's Workshop <- not mobile friendly :-(
• Substack
• medium.com

A lot of time and energy is spent on thinking about how to organize your notes into folders, and many people use Quick Switcher as the main way to both create and open notes, even to simply access some information. I started this way, too.

But none of this is necessary, because Obsidian is a non-relational (NoSQL) database containing information of a data type called graph. You don't access information in a database by navigating to a table and opening it up, you use queries. In Obsidian, you can use filters.

Filters can be bookmarked, and the bookmarks can be organized any way you want. This way you can build an information tree instead of a file tree. You can easily move your information around, and even have the same information in multiple locations. With Hover Preview and Hover Editor, you don't even need to actually open files except when creating or developing them.

I wrote a series of articles describing this system. It seems a bit scary at first, but the efficiency gain is considerable. You can read the articles here:

Website:

• biscotty's Workshop

Substack:

• Stop Wasting Time With Directories and Filenames
• Meaningless Names, No Directories, Now What?
• Obsidian is a NoSQL Database

Medium.com:

• Stop Wasting Time With Directories and Filenames
• Meaningless Names, No Directories, Now What?
• Obsidian is a NoSQL Database

Syncthing is free, open source software that can be used to easily synchronize an Obsidian vault between your computer and phone/tablet. Not only free, but completely secure, private, and blazing fast. Here are links to an article I wrote explaining how to use it.

• Biscotty's Workshop not mobile friendly :-(
• Substack
• Medium.com