Obsidian, my new read-it-later app?
I use and love Obsidian for more than 3 years now.
I already told you about this application twice: « Obsidian, mon nouvel outil de prise de notes » and « Créer une note bien rangée dans Obsidian grâce à une seule lettre » (sorry, it’s in french). I even developed a plugin to shrink your pinned tabs.
Today, I want to show you how you can use Obsidian to replace Pocket, Instapaper, Omnivore or wallabag (oh wait!), as your read-it-later application.
One of Obsidian’s great strengths is that you save your notes locally and in markdown: this is what we will do with our web articles.
Locally and in markdown ❤️
Requirements:
- Obsidian 😅
- ReadItLater plugin
ReadItLater is a simple plugin for Obsidian to collect interesting information from your clipboard into your vault.
I configured a new keyboard shortcut (CMD + Shift + R) to execute the Save clipboard command.
My workflow
I’m reading a web article (or a YouTube video, a Mastodon toot, whatever) and I want to archive it locally. Here are the steps to do that:
- I copy its URL to the clipboard
- I open Obsidian
CMD + Shift + R- That’s it.
💡 A great improvement could be to have a browser extension or a bookmarklet.
Classify article
Obsidian supports tags and properties. With these features, you can easily assign new tags or other properties (for example, the status: unread, favorite, etc.).
List unread articles
With Dataview plugin, it’s easy to create a new note which lists unread articles for examples. Or your favorites ones.
Share article with someone
In wallabag, you can share a saved article with someone by creating a public link.
With « Share note » plugin, it’s so easy to have this behavior.
For example, here is an article I saved with Obsidian and that I share with you thanks to the plugin: https://share.note.sx/0g63rt07#4gU5b9Y4IDqL9XZvLfVQAxA64xLzYF9i36eHuCACtfc.
To conclude
Give it a try to this solution, it can be nice for you if you’re looking for an offline solution (and with content saved in markdown).