The Obsidian Vault Rebuild — Customizing the Readwise Feed into Obsidian with Metadata, Dataview, and Permanent Links

Kara Monroe
12 min readOct 23, 2022
Readwise provides aggregation of your highlights from around the web, a beautiful online reading platform, and spaced repetition delivered right to your inbox.

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.

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Kara Monroe

I am a world traveler, part-time road warrior, and home body all wrapped up in one gadget-loving package. Writer, photographer, chef, and aspiring artist.