2021-12-11: Nominate Gems of the Year & a new book club

In The Community

• the 400th community plugin was approved this week: CookLang
• You can now nominate your favorite plugins, content creators, & themes. Share your favorite workflows & most impressive achievements in this year's "Gems of the Year" award event.
• There's going to be a book club hosted by history teacher Dan Allosso for The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David Wengrow (which I am currently reading myself!)
• Here's a nice reflection about how personal knowledge management communities are like knowledge graphs

Obsidian Updates

Plugin News

Note: Not all new plugins are available in the community list yet, as they need to go through code review first. You can manually install plugins that aren't in the community list yet by using the Beta Reviewer's Auto-update Tool. Note, though, that this is not as safe as waiting for them to go through code review.

New

• You can now sync all of your Matter (an iOS read-later app) highlights and notes directly to your Obsidian vault.
• Generic initiative Tracker for TTRPGs is a fork of Initiative Tracker. It aims to separate out the initiative concepts from the DnD 5e specific stuff to make it system agnostic.
• Regex Replace provides search/replace functionality that supports regular expressions and selections.
• Attachment Name Formatting will format all attachments in the format: filename attachmentFormat indexNumber.xxx
• Link Favicon will show link favicons without requiring any custom CSS.
• Get Info creates a small menu inside your status bar and shows helpful information for your chosen file.
• Global Hotkeys adds support for system-wide global hotkeys.
• You can give your tags a file tree like a folder system.
• There's a new wordpress integration.
• You can now create markdown-based reveal.js presentations in Obsidian.

Updates

• Map View 1.0.0 has a UI for editing market icons and a bunch of other cool features.
• MySnippets now lets users create new CSS snippet files within a workspace.
• Various Components v3.2.0 has some fancy new commands!

Betas

• CSV Codeblock will render CSV codeblocks as tables.
• Skribi provides dynamic, live templating features for non-destructively rendering elements inside of notes.
• Task-Changer plugin supports both live preview and source mode now.  You can try it by adding Quorafind/Obsidian-Task-Changer to brat now.

Under The Radar

• Despite the name, commits doesn't have anything to do with git per se, it just tracks what you've worked on each day and what changed, with a bunch of different queries you can make.

For Developers

• The theme dev vault has examples of asides, footnotes, citations, lists, tasks with data-task variants, etc.
• Here's a discussion about the limitations of codemirror 6, which is the library powering mobile & the new Live Preview mode.
• Theme Design Utilities lets users emulate mobile, post a test notice, or feeze Obsidian. There's also quick access to a CSS cheat sheet that @TFTHacker made.

Feature Requests

• A most used words/phrases plugin.

Appearance

• There is a new Harmonic theme.
• There is a new Alchemy theme
• Minimal has improved support for Live Preview.
• Sanctum got some mobile hotfixes; users should update.
• Bubble Space Theme v1.2 got a big update with some more plugin styling.
• Prism 1.1.0 got a bunch of refinements and cleared a bunch of outstanding issues.

Ancillary Code

• Here's a Notion to Markdown converter.
• The obsidian-repos-downloader Python script for downloading all published themes and plugins got some updates

Guides

• Here's how to use use Google Assistant to add notes about a podcast to your vault
• Here's Curtis McHale on using Obsidian to work through writing idaas for a book and incremental writing in Obsidian.
• Here's a minimal, pre-configured personal knowledge management system based off of Zettelkasten & Evergreen Notes principles.
• Kepano shared his list of 40 questions to ask yourself every year.

Discussions

• There was a great discussion on Reddit about how to take notes as a college student. Here's a similar discussion in Discord, complete with an infographic.
• Here was a discussion about using Obsidian for a zettelkasten that touches on the graph view for very large zettelkastens.

Showcases

• Sébastien Dubois shared their system for personal knowledge management using Obsidian. Here was the accompanying discussion.
• The vault of Anthony Agbay has a bunch of programming, chemistry, engineering, and medicine notes.
• Here's @Curio Heart reflecting on how using Obsidian for National Novel Writing Month 2021 went. Here's Vanessa Glau.
• Here's a cool video on Zettelkasten.
• Here's a short video of an Andean Archaeology class's vault developing, with teacher notes in bright green and students' notes in white and a few brief peaks into the notes themselves.

Ancillary Tools

• A tool for creating SVG timelines from simple JSON input
• This "nutritional label for food for thought" created by community member Paul Bricman is really, really cool. I haven't delved into how to use it yet, but the background reading was very thought-provoking.
• Text Buddy is a MacOS for manipulating text.
• Here's a tool to convert a Realm Works (TTRPG software) Output file into other formats (i.e. Markdown files for Obsidian)
• HackMD is still the best tool I'm aware of for collaboratively working on markdown files, google docs style.
• Here are some StumbleUpon esque sites that got surfaced during discussion: Discuuver & Stumbled.

Housekeeping

• My family all tested negative for COVID, thank you for all the well-wishes! I'm still recovering from whatever minor bug I coincidentally caught, but we're doing well. 💚
• Note: I shipped this Thursday morning, because I'll be on vacation when you get it, so if I missed something that would normally have been included, check back next week