Obsidian Resources

[EleanorKonik]

Ye Olde Obsidian Resources page, courtsey of the Obsidian Roundup, which is currently experiencing my (annual?) DNS glitches.

If you are looking for past editions of the Roundup, I highly recommend checking them out on the hub: 🗂️ Obsidian Roundup - Obsidian Hub - Obsidian Publish

In the interests of efficiency (and a pathological avoidance of redundant work), this list is not intended to take the place of other Obsidian resources. It will, however, hopefully maintain a static ‘state of the meta’ roundup of resources that might also be worth following along with, depending on your use-case. This is not necessarily exhaustive, and will skew towards things that get resurfaced often.

Official

• For fast, synchronous discussion of potential bugs, the Obsidian Members Group on Discord is probably your best bet, and the developers are very active there.
• The best place for longform, evergreen resources, workflow tips, and code snippets is the Discourse forum. This is definitely where bug reports and feature requests should go so they don’t get lost in the shuffle of Discord conversation. For ease of using it as an archival system, please, please, search before creating a new report.
• If you really hate live chats and creating new accounts, the ObsidianMD reddit community does exist and is monitored by the Obsidian mod team.
• Note: Due to the incredible pace of development, it’s really hard to keep Obsidian-related documentation up to date. If you’d like to help, you can contribute on the github repository.
• The getting started guide isn’t always the most cutting edge, but it has the benefit of being official. A quasi-official community-run alternative is the Hub, which strives to collect showcases, templates, guides, workflows, courses, and resources (including the Obsidian roundup) into an organized, easy-to-search format. I strongly recommend starting there when looking for information, as it’s the most centralized resource I’m aware of. If you know of something that isn’t included, please consider submitting a pull request to add it!

For Beginners

• Here’s a great guide on getting started from scratch.
• This guide is not terribly opinionated, but comprehensive.
• Nick Milo has an Obsidian For Beginners series on youtube.
• Here’s everything you need to know to use Obsidian as a second brain.
• Here’s an excellent introduction to markdown for beginners video.
• I really like this Obsidian basics write-up; it starts very basic which is great for total beginners to markdown, is quite in depth, and has lots of pictures.
• This is an organizational system aimed at beginners who aren’t quite sure how to roll their own custom system yet.
• Sergio has a great Mastering Obsidian series on YouTube.
• This Obsidian beginner’s guide via Adrian Try over at Sitepoint is an excellent starting point!
• This beginner’s guide is aimed at people trying to use Obsidian for role playing games.
• Matt Birchler put together a handy 12-minute Getting Started with Obsidian video guide.
• There’s a playlist for Obsidian over at Productivity Guru that does a nice job of introducing the basics.
• Josh Duffney also has a nice video guide aimed at total beginners.
• Danny Hatcher put together a beginner’s guide for building a second brain from scratch using Obsidian. He’s also got a great guide for how Obsidian themes and CSS work.
• Here’s the best how to develop plugins for Obsidian guide I’m aware of.

Paid Options

• Nick Milo of the Linking Your Thinking workshop has a YouTube channel that often touches on things useful to Obsidian, although not all LYT folks are Obsidian users. He also has a self-paced Obsidian Flight School course with tons of content and, bonus, it’s an Obsidian vault to practice in.
• Obsidian for Everyone via Nicole van der Hoeven focuses on practical tutorials instead of methodologies. It’s self-paced, has an accompanying sample vault and PDF handbook, and focuses on a plugin-free experience. The first lesson is available free on Youtube.
• Obsidian Made Simple via Justin DiRose at Keep Productive has 55+ lessons designed to take users from beginner to advanced.
• Curtis McHale does one-on-one coaching and also has a getting started self-paced Obsidian course.
• Here’s a starter kit from Sébastien Dubois with recommended plugins, explanations of common terms and organizational structures, etc.
• Santi Younger also has a YouTube channel and teaches people how to use Obsidian in a paid self-paced course.
• This (paid) self-paced course from The Sweet Setup folks is an option as well.
• Effective Remote Work has an Obsidian Playlist and also has a course.

Personal Knowledge Management

• This roundup of different classification & organization systems that can be leveraged for personal knowledge management is a great starting point.
• This summary of How To Take Smart Notes is a fairly nice primer on how many people in the Obsidian community approach note-taking. @joshduffney has a more targeted tutorial on how to follow the Smart Notes philosophy.
• This summary of the Zettelkasten method is also very informative.
• The LYT kit by @nickmilo is a more up-to-date methodology that leans on flexibility and leverages Obsidian’s features more specifically.

Workflows

• This meta thread on various sync options is meant to offer explanations of how to set up third party sync, which are not generally officially supported by the developers but do often work if you put in the setup time.
• This dataview snippet showcase is an incredibly useful list of how one can leverage the incredibly powerful dataview plugin, which was also the topic of the first Obsidian Community Talk. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2 on YouTube. There’s also a channel in Discord where a lot of the Dataview experts hang out and help troubleshoot issues. I recommend checking out this excellent beginner’s guide before asking questions there, though.
• This meta thread on migration workflows is meant to be a roundup of methods to people import/transfer from other tools.
• @liam maintains an unofficial FAQ for plugin development that is pretty helpful. This mini FAQ is also a handy place to start if you’re interested in developing plugins for Obsidian.

Other Resources

• Obsidian Community Talks is community driven and open-ended based on what sorts of discussions people request. Everyone is welcome to host!

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If you see anything out of date, or have suggestions of things to add, please let me know!