I’ve started using Obsidian to organise my notes. For a few years now, while I’ve been building up my career as a beer writer, I’ve gathered all sorts of research: I’ve clipped web pages, marked extracts in books, transcribed hours upon hours of interviews with fascinating people, filled books with tasting notes…
I’ve used it to write my articles, and then… nothing. I’ve just filed it away. And I couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that if this material were better organised I’d get more out of it. What I wanted was some way to see it all together, and to form connections between the various bits. Then I could reuse all this stuff, that I’d spent so much time and effort to gather, to create new things.
Well… yes. Obsidian lets you do just that. Hooray. But I’m not here to write about that today. (I’ll link a video at the bottom if you want to learn more.) Instead I’m just going to focus on a small thing I’ve put together that helps me to get notes into the platform easily, wherever I am.
One important thing to note: Obsidian isn’t cloud based. It works with local files. There’s no mobile app.
The basic idea
I use an app called Hazel to watch a particular folder in my Dropbox. Whenever I drop a text file in there, it performs these simple actions:
- It calls on a Python script to rename the file and convert it from plain text to…
