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The Obsidian Vault Rebuild — Customizing the Readwise Feed into Obsidian with Metadata, Dataview, and Permanent Links
Readwise is a combination content aggregator and spaced repetition system. Using Readwise — and focusing on the value of Readwise — not just reading, but learning from what you read — has led me to change everything about how I read and learn from information that I do consume online. Using Readwise has also made me a more conscious consumer of information. Readwise has forced me to recognize that I was consuming a lot of content and not doing anything with it — that has all changed!
Readwise creates a lot of “base” content within my Obsidian vault. Highlights that come straight from the books I’m reading on Kindle and in real life are delivered directly to Obsidian every time I open the Obsidian — although I’ll show you how to set this to be whatever interval you want it to be. From that base content, I create cards (e.g. zettels if you are Zettelkasten person), capture quotes, convert ideas into article and tweet sparks in my Obsidian Writing Workshop, and more. As I’m redesigning my vault from the ground up to be purpose built to exactly how I want to work and maximize Obsidian and the tools I use with it — I spent quite a bit of time customizing how Readwise sends information to my vault.
The changes I’ve made in this process were inspired by two articles by TfTHacker and a whole lot of playing around and testing on my part. I encourage you to read those articles as TfTHacker provides additional insights I won’t cover and also makes some different choices in how they bring things into their vault than how I do them in mine. If you’re going to undertake restructuring your feed from Obsidian, reading and/or watching a few different perspectives is a good idea. Additionally, make sure you TEST all of your settings changes in a blank vault before you import into your active vault. You’ll save yourself a lot of headaches by doing so. This process also encourages you to do something I believe is very important which is documenting your changes.
Here are those articles by TfTHacker along with a little detail on how I changed things in my vault based on their suggestions:
- Original article by TfTHacker —…
