Database for Movies or Books in Obsidian

Using Obsidian To Make A Database For Books, Television Series And Movies

I’ve heard many people get excited over Obsidian and say how wonderful it is. A couple of years ago I gave it a try and I didn’t really like it very much. I gravitated towards Craft, because it’s a proper Mac application and looks good while doing it’s stuff. I’ve paid for a subscription for the year for Craft because I enjoyed the synchronisation abilities it has. It’s always good to have all of your information everywhere, on the iPhone, on the iPad on the iMac and even in a browser on whatever. I gave Logseq a good try and I liked it. I did the synchronisation using Git and Github alongside using Working Copy on the iOS devices. Generally, I was pretty happy with the way it was working. Now and then it would be annoying with the synchronisation not working exactly right. Something triggered me to give Obsidian another try. And now I am glad that I did.

Why Do I Like Obsidian So Much Now?

I’m getting all the good stuff I had in Craft plus a huge amount of customisation and in particular, tags. There are weird workarounds to give you something like tags in Craft. I have no idea on earth why Craft hasn’t included tags right from the start. It costs more for the synchronisation you get with Obsidian, but overall the application has a huge amount of extra functionality. It’s the bees knees in terms of personal knowledge management applications, the crème de la crème of PKM. I’m now running Obsidian on my Raspberry Pi’s as well as all of my Apple devices. The synchronisation is fast and secure with encryption covering my data end to end. The big thing with Obsidian is the huge variety of plug-ins available to really customise the application. This is what it needs to make your own database for things like books, television series and movies. Dataview is one of these plug-ins and the other is Database Folder.

Using Dataview And Database Folder

It’s easy to install plug-ins into Obsidian, and this was certainly the case with Dataview and Database Folder. I followed a few tutorials showing me how to get data into the Dataview plug-in applied into a document. It is something similar to a MySQL query with it’s language and I found it easier to work with than the queries in Logseq. Another reason to move towards Obsidian rather than Logseq. So I did a video showing how to set up these databases, one using just Dataview and the other one using Database Folder. Check the video out below.

The very next day after making the video I found another tutorial showing me how to bring in data from a movies database. This will make it much easier for putting the data into Obsidian when I’m sitting on the sofa with my iPad or iPhone. All I need to do is to add my own rating and review to complete the task. This second way to set up the movies database in Obsidian took more setting up and required other plug-ins and even a JavaScript file to make it work. Following the instructions step-by-step was pretty easy. Here is the video showing how I set it up for myself.

I’ve also found something similar to show me how to bring in data for book information. It’s always good to be a lazy, geeky person because we’re always looking for a quicker, easier and more efficient way of using technology. I have all my information of the books I’ve read in Goodreads. Goodreads is a useful tool because they put you in contact with other book readers and makes recommendations for your next book. I think it’s a better idea though, to have your own database because you never know what changes might happen to the external service. It could stop working completely or they could leak your data from it or whatever. If you keep all of your data in house, then it’s much safer and you only have to make sure you have a good backups.

So It’s Obsidian For The Win

This morning I found out I could do the callouts in Obsidian I’ve been able to use in Logseq. I also found a plug-in which allowed me to do snippets to do quick replacement of text. Same sort of thing I’ve been using on my Mac using either the built in text replacement by using Text Expander or Keyboard Maestro. The good thing about it is that I can do this on my Raspberry Pi within the Linux system. So I’ve got similar functionality whatever device I might be using.

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