Naming things is HARD. Top five tips for naming notes in Obsidian
Welcome and happy Friday!
Naming things is hard. Whether you’re naming a baby, a boat, or a note, it’s hard to do well.
But names are essential. Without a good name, your note will get lost. Note names are like YouTube thumbnails: they tell you whether the content inside is worth your time or not.
Here are my top five tips for you to name your notes in Obsidian:
- Each note should contain one idea
- Rename notes some time after you first write them
- Search before creating
- If you look for an idea and have trouble finding it, rename the note
- Add aliases, but sparingly
If you want more details on these points, the full article is here: Five ideas for naming notes in Obsidian.
Some housekeeping: yesterday I woke up to find that Obsidian.Rocks was dead. The web host was down. I’ve hosted my websites on Media Temple for years, but I’ve noticed my server has gotten more and more unstable in the last couple of years. Media Temple has been transferring everything over to GoDaddy (a company that acquired them several years ago), and everything has gotten much worse as a result.
It could be that these issues will be fixed a few months from now, but I’ve been fighting it for months, and I’m tired of it. It also seems like GoDaddy is moving towards retiring the product I’ve used for almost a decade now. So in a rush of inspiration I transferred Obsidian Rocks from Media Temple to Digital Ocean.
Digital Ocean is a breath of fresh air. It was a lot more work setting it up, but now that I have it set up I’m quite happy. I’m looking forward to transferring the rest of my sites over, and you can look forward to a snappier experience visiting the site.
If you notice any technical issues on Obsidian Rocks, let me know. I think the transfer went seamlessly, but you never know.
In other Obsidian news, for you Dataview fans out there, I’m still waiting breathlessly for the first version of Datacore to be released. In case you haven’t heard, Datacore is the successor to Dataview: created by the same guy, Datacore will be faster and more feature-rich than Dataview.
But while we wait, I thought it would be a good idea to write an article on the fundamentals of Dataview. Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, it’s a good idea to brush up on your knowledge of Dataview. You can save yourself a lot of time by building systems and automating just a few key things in your vault. In the article, we go through:
- The fundamentals of Dataview (including the four query formats in the image below)
- Limiting your queries
- Types of data in Dataview
- Excluding results from your query
- Tasks and Dataview
- A few of my favorite recipes (check these out, even if you aren’t interested in the rest)
Even if you’ve been using Dataview for a while, you might learn some things from this article. It’s beginner-focused but we dive deep into some of the most useful features of Dataview.
Do you use Dataview? If so, what’s your favorite use-case? Reply to this email and let me know.
That’s all for now! If you have any questions or comments, send 'em my way.
Ciao~
Tim
Hi! I'm Tim.
I'm a web developer, an avid note taker, and I run a website called Obsidian.Rocks.
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