My Obsidian Journal

I started using Obsidian in a somehow unusual use case: I want to browse my personal website (this site) on my phone.

I cloned the source repository of my website to my iCloud drive, then opened it in Obsidian iOS app as a vault. My modifications on the iPhone will be synced via iCloud to my Mac, then I will finish the changes, commit them, and push them to GitHub.

Markdown Extensions

Wiki Links

One thing I like about Obsidian is the wiki-link syntax. The bracketed link syntax reminds my good old days of using ikiwiki. The way Obsidian implemented it means I can link to any page with its name, regardless of which directory the page file locates in and what file extension the page file uses. And this inspires me to use this wiki-link syntax in my website. It turns out very easy since someone already wrote a remark plugin for Obsidian-style wiki-link syntax.

Highlighted Text and Callouts

Besides wiki-links, with this plugin, I also get callouts and highlighted text for free.

I seldom use highlighted text but I think it might be useful if I quote a large chunk of text and want to highlight some part of it. This ==highlighted text== syntax is not supported in GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) but it is supported in lowdown.

Two additional types of double-emphasis are the strike-through and highlight. These are produced by pairs of tilde and equal characters, respectively:

~~Kirk~~Picard is the best ==captain==.

The highlight variant may be enabled in lowdown(1) with highlight parsing enabled.

-- man 5 lowdown

As for callouts, I am not a fan of them. First, the Obsidian callout syntax is not compatible with GFM. Second, those callout types using English words such as "note" and "tip", while one thing I like about markdown is its syntax is language agnostic,

Organizing Notes

Tags

Obsidian supports two ways to tag a note:

1. Just write #tag anywhere in the note text.

   That is similar to what people do in some social media like Twitter and Instagram.

2. Use the tags field in the YAML front matter.

   This is also the way used in Lume.

Currently I am not using tags in this site. However, I do plan to use them in the future. Below are some initial thoughts:

• I will use the YAML front matter way, since:

  • It is supported in Lume.

  • It avoids accidentally tagging a note when writing something like an IRC channel name.

• Obsidian supports nested tags like #tag/subtag. But I will not use them, since:

  • It is not supported in Lume.

  • I'd like to keep the hierarchy of tags simple and flat.

  • There are alternatives to nested tags: just use fields.

    For example, instead of tagging #status/draft, I might use status: draft in the YAML front matter.

• I will use #kebab-case.

  Obsidian supports #camelCase, #PascalCase, #snake_case, and #kebab-case. I find kebab-case more readable and this also matches the style guides of StackOverflow.

• I will only use the tag to categorize the note according to its topic.

  In other words, I will avoid meta-tags. And if I do need them, I will use a field in the YAML front matter instead.