- **By**: [[Steph Ango]] - **Date Published**: - **Date Read**: 2025-03-02T09:31:51+00:00 - [**Read Original**](https://stephango.com/vault) - **Tags**: **Note:** Below is the text from an online article – none of the writing is by me. I use [Obsidian](https://stephango.com/obsidian) to think, take notes, write essays, and publish this site. This is my bottom-up approach to note-taking and organizing things I am interested in. It embraces chaos and laziness to create emergent structure. In Obsidian, a “vault” is simply a folder of files. This is important because it adheres to my [File over app](https://stephango.com/file-over-app) philosophy. If you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Obsidian gives you that freedom. The following is in no way dogmatic, just one example of how you can use Obsidian. Take the parts you like. ## Get started 1. [Download the vault](https://github.com/kepano/kepano-obsidian/archive/refs/heads/main.zip) or clone it from [the Github repo](https://github.com/kepano/kepano-obsidian) 2. Unzip the `.zip` file to a folder of your choosing 3. In Obsidian open the folder as a vault - My theme [Minimal](https://stephango.com/minimal) - [Obsidian Web Clipper](https://stephango.com/obsidian-web-clipper) to save articles and pages from the web, see my [clipper templates](https://github.com/kepano/clipper-templates) for specific sites I clip from - [Obsidian Sync](https://obsidian.md/sync) to sync notes between my desktop, phone and tablet ## Plugins Some of my templates depend on plugins: - [Dataview](https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview) for overview notes - [Leaflet](https://github.com/javalent/obsidian-leaflet) for maps ## Folders I use very few folders, only six folders to be precise. I avoid folders because many of my entries belong to more than one area of thought. My system is oriented towards speed and laziness. I don’t want the overhead of having to consider where something should go. I do not use sub-folders. I do not use the file explorer much for navigation. I mostly navigate using the quick switcher or clicking links. These are three main folders I use: - **Root** (no folder) where I write about my personal world. This includes journal entries, essays, [evergreen](https://stephango.com/evergreen-notes) notes, and other personal notes. - **References** where I write about things that exist outside my world. Books, movies, places, people, podcasts, etc. Always named using the title e.g. `Book title.md` or `Movie title.md`. - **Clippings** where I save things other people wrote, mostly essays and articles. These folders exist for admin purposes: - **Attachments** for images, audio, videos, PDFs, etc. - **Daily** for my daily notes, all named `YYYY-MM-DD.md`. - **Templates** for templates. Two folders are in the downloadable vault for the sake of clarity. These notes would be in the **root** of my personal vault: - **Categories** contains top-level overviews of notes per category (e.g. Books, Movies, Podcasts, etc). - **Notes** contains example notes. My notes are primarily organized using the `category` property. Categories are always links which makes it easy to get back to my top-level overviews. Some other rules I follow in my vault: - Avoid splitting content into multiple vaults. - Avoid folders for organization. - Avoid non-standard Markdown. - Always pluralize categories and tags. - Use `YYYY-MM-DD` dates everywhere. Having a [consistent style](https://stephango.com/style) collapses hundreds of future decisions into one, and gives me focus. I always pluralize tags so I never have to wonder what to name new tags. Choose the rules that feel comfortable to you. ## Links I use internal links profusely throughout my notes. I try to always link the first mention of something. My journals entries are often a stream of consciousness cataloging recent events, finding connections between things. Often the link is *unresolved*, meaning that the note for that link isn’t created yet. Unresolved links are important because they are breadcrumbs for future connections between things. A journal entry in my **root folder** might look something like this: > *I went to see the movie \[\[Perfect Days\]\] with \[\[Aisha\]\] at \[\[Vidiots\]\] and had Filipino food at \[\[Little Ongpin\]\]. I loved this quote from Perfect Days: \[\[Next time is next time, now is now\]\]. It reminds me of the essay …* The movie, movie theater, and restaurant each link to entries in my **References** folder. In these reference notes I capture properties, my rating, and thoughts about that thing. I use [Web Clipper](https://stephango.com/obsidian-web-clipper) to help populate properties from databases like IMDB. The quote was meaningful to me, so it became an [evergreen note](https://stephango.com/evergreen-notes) in my root folder. The essay I mention is in my **Clippings** folder, because I didn’t write it myself. This heavy linking style becomes more useful as time goes on, because I can trace how ideas emerged, and the branching paths these ideas created. ## Templates and properties Almost every note I create starts from a [template](https://github.com/kepano/kepano-obsidian/tree/main/Templates). I use templates heavily because they allow me to lazily add information that will help me find the note later. I have a template for every category with properties at the top, to capture data such as: - **Dates** — created, start, end, published - **People** — author, director, artist, cast, host, guests - **Themes** — grouping by genre, type, topic, related notes - **Locations** — neighborhood, city, coordinates - **Ratings** — more on this below A few rules I follow for properties: - Property names and values should aim to be reusable across categories. This allows me to find things across categories, e.g. `genre` is shared across all media types, which means I can see an archive of *Sci-fi* books, movies and shows in one place. - Templates should aim to be composable, e.g. *Person* and *Author* are two different templates that can be added to the same note. - Short property names are faster to type, e.g. `start` instead of `startdate`. - Default to `list` type properties instead of `text` if there is any chance it might contain more than one link or value in the future. The [.obsidian/types.json](https://github.com/kepano/kepano-obsidian/blob/main/.obsidian/types.json) file lists which properties are assigned to which types (i.e. `date`, `number`, `text`, etc). ## Rating system Anything with a `rating` uses an integer from 1 to 7: - 7 — **Perfect**, must try, life-changing, go out of your way to seek this out - 6 — **Excellent**, worth repeating - 5 — **Good**, don’t go out of your way, but enjoyable - 4 — **Passable**, works in a pinch - 3 — **Bad**, don’t do this if you can - 2 — **Atrocious**, actively avoid, repulsive - 1 — **Evil**, life-changing in a bad way Why this scale? I like rating out of 7 better than 4 or 5 because I need more granularity at the top, for the good experiences, and 10 is too granular. ## Publishing to the web This site is written, edited, and published directly from Obsidian. To do this, I break one of my rules listed above — I have a separate vault for my site. I use a *static site generator* called [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/) to automatically compile my notes into a website and convert them from Markdown to HTML. My publishing flow is easy to use, but a bit technical to set up. This is because I like to have full control over every aspect of my site’s layout. If you don’t need full control you might consider [Obsidian Publish](https://obsidian.md/publish) which is more user-friendly, and what I use for my [Minimal documentation site](https://minimal.guide/publish/download). For this site, I push notes from Obsidian to a GitHub repo using the [Obsidian Git](https://obsidian.md/plugins?id=obsidian-git) plugin. The notes are then automatically compiled using [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/) with my web host [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/). I also use my [Permalink Opener](https://stephango.com/permalink-opener) plugin to quickly open notes in the browser so I can compare the draft and live versions. The color palette is [Flexoki](https://stephango.com/flexoki), which I created for this site. My Jekyll template is not public, but you can get similar results from [this template](https://github.com/maximevaillancourt/digital-garden-jekyll-template) by Maxime Vaillancourt. There are also many alternatives to Jekyll you can use to compile your site such as [Quartz](https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/), [Astro](https://astro.build/), [Eleventy](https://www.11ty.dev/), and [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/). - [File over app](https://stephango.com/file-over-app) - [Concise explanations accelerate progress](https://stephango.com/concise) - [Evergreen notes turn ideas into objects that you can manipulate](https://stephango.com/evergreen-notes) - [40 questions to ask yourself every year](https://stephango.com/40-questions) - [40 questions to ask yourself every decade](https://stephango.com/40-questions-decade) - [How I do my to-dos](https://stephango.com/todos)