personal knowledge management

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📜️ Zotero Research Paper Workflow | Full Comprehensive Setup Guide 🛠️

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Overview

So I've heard that much of my Zotero workflow was still too complex to fathom or setup by others so I have endeavored yet again to make a comprehensive overview video of the process but this time in a sandbox environment with granular setup instructions where appropriate and hoping that this will really open the door for many where this workflow is concerned :)

Timestamps

🌟️ Supercharge Your [[Links]] In Obsidian | Comprehensive Guide 🔗️

PART 1

Overview

The supercharged links plugin is a super awesome lightweight plugin that can be used to display visual flare or additional information on the links in your vault. This plguin can take a rule like "if a note has this tag" and then apply content in a variety of ways.

After making this video i actually realized that if i turned off the plugin nothing happens, i actually wasnt using the plugin in all 🤣️ so i have to make an update video shortly to cover the topic at more length because it will be the same result but with additional functionality and displays of the metadata.

Timestamps

  • 0:00:00 Welcome
  • 0:00:22 SUPPORT THE CHANNEL
  • 0:00:56 What Is Supercharged Links And What Does It Do
  • 0:01:55 What The Symbols Mean
  • 0:02:33 Example Of Metadata Feeding Supercharged Links
  • 0:03:03 The Setup
  • 0:05:27 The Gotchya Of The Plugin Configuration
  • 0:07:50 How I Get Around This Issue With CSS
  • 0:09:30 In Summary
  • 0:09:57 Optimizing For Search
  • 0:12:15 Conclusion
  • 0:12:44 Outro

PART 2

Overview

So in the first video it turned out i wasnt using the plugin at all for the effects i thought were attributed to the plugin, rather it was all just CSS the entire time. Now i actually setup the plugin (after this little discovery) and implemented it and fully covered the topic 😅️

Timestamps

  • 0:00:00 Welcome
  • 0:00:09 The Problem
  • 0:01:01 SUPPORT THE CHANNEL
  • 0:01:35 Supercharged Links Plugin
  • 0:02:09 The Issue With Duplicate Rules
  • 0:03:33 Configuring The Plugin Settings
  • 0:06:48 https://github.com/sponsors/tallguyjenks
  • 0:06:58 Configuration Data Files
  • 0:08:00 The Effects of The Supercharged Links Plugin
  • 0:10:38 The Interoperability of Supercharged Links With Other Plugins
  • 0:11:32 Supercharging My Non Input Links
  • 0:12:33 How My Downstream Workflow Was Affected
  • 0:14:40 Closing
  • 0:14:56 Outro

🏆️ TOP 10 BEST Obsidian Plugins 🔌️

Overview

There are over 1,000 plugins now in the Obsidian plugin ecosystem, and these are a few of my top favorites and a bit about why they have such a high standing on my list.

Timestamps

  • 0:00:00 Welcome
  • 0:00:15 INTO THE AM
  • 0:01:45 The Top 10 Plugins
  • 0:01:55 01 Templater and 02 Dataview
  • 0:03:42 03 Update Time On Edit
  • 0:05:47 04 Obsidian Zotero Integration
  • 0:06:52 05 DB Folder
  • 0:08:27 06 Projects
  • 0:09:26 07 Commander
  • 0:10:55 08 Daily Notes
  • 0:11:54 09 Calendar and Periodic Notes
  • 0:12:53 10 Supercharged Links and Editor Note Count
  • 0:15:14 Closing
  • 0:15:37 Outro
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📅️ My Fully Automated Daily Note Review System In Obsidian 🤖️

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Overview

I have had a fairly robust daily notes system since the early days of my usage of Obsidian. Over time of course this process gets refined and improved. The system i have now is probably the most intentional i've ever been about journaling and reviewing the words of my past self.

I hope there will be some useful nuggets of insight in this video that will help you shape and improve your own system :)

Timestamps

  • 0:00:00 Welcome
  • 0:00:21 Why The Change
  • 0:01:24 INTO THE AM
  • 0:02:18 My Actual Daily Notes
  • 0:03:22 Dataview Queries
  • 0:05:31 My Highlights Tag
  • 0:06:39 Weekly Note Example
  • 0:07:29 Monthly Note Example
  • 0:07:52 Aliases Query
  • 0:09:43 The Yearly Note Example
  • 0:11:14 Why Are You Doing All Of This
  • 0:11:59 Closing
  • 0:12:17 Outro
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How I'm Organizing My Autism Research With Obsidian Canvas

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This Video

This video was a fun one to make as i've been falling into more effective ways to doing more research type work and as you well know in the doing of the thing, the truth of the act presents itself. It's one thing to say "this is an effective way of using this tool" and another to actually be doing real work with the tool and actually experience pain points and find better optimizations and strategies.

In this video I aim to show you some of the ways i'm actually performing some of my research information consolidation and analysis using Obsidian Canvas and a variety of other tools that i already talk about ad naseum on my channel. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts in the YouTube comments!

Timestamps

  • 0:00:00 Welcome
  • 0:00:27 Visually Oriented
  • 0:00:56 https://amzn.to/3s8jGbP
  • 0:01:42 I Think I May Have Highlighted A Little Much
  • 0:03:39 The Start Of This Workflow
  • 0:04:42 Centralizing And Standardizing The Data Input
  • 0:04:56 Unmasking Autism Book Input
  • 0:06:19 CARD Latest Zotero Workflow Video
  • 0:06:43 Other Autism Related Books With Fewer Highlights
  • 0:08:05 Research Paper Inputs
  • 0:08:54 Why I Like The Canvas Approach
  • 0:09:55 The Autism Research Canvas
  • 0:10:52 Color Key
  • 0:13:11 Highlight Transclusion
  • 0:16:25 Topic Bookmarks
  • 0:17:08 Closing
  • 0:18:08 Outro
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🐇️ Research Rabbit & Zotero Sync | Research Paper Discovery Will Never Be The Same 📜️

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In this video I cover the new Research Rabbit Zotero Sync and how to leverage tools in both applications for an amazingly robust workflow around research paper discovery, management, and note taking!

One of my favorite ways of interacting with research papers now is taking an existing Zotero collection, syncing it to Research Rabbit (RR), then then discovering new papers with RR and syncing them back to Zotero and using the Sci-Hub add-on to make sure i get copies of every paper for my research. There's a lot of great add-ons in Zotero to aid in your Research :)

Morgen: My New Favorite Calendar App

Morgen is a fantastic young calendar application that I have come to adore. I was asked to review the application and give my honest and unfiltered feedback on it and to be honest, there's not much to dislike and what I did have to say in that regard is actively being built.

The short and skinny of the video is:

  • Pros:
    • Shortcuts for views and filters
    • Great UI/UX
    • Calendar centralization
    • Calendar view grouping
    • Availability time export
    • Resolving many iCal pain points for me
    • Availability Schedulable links (one time and recurring slots)
  • Cons:
    • No support for enterprise options at the moment (firewalls like government email accounts etc.)
    • No mobile apps
    • No task manager integration (Todoist coming soon)
    • No payment processing like Calendy for the schedulable links (Coming soon)

All in all i see a bright future for the app and i'm eagerly awaiting for those cons to be resolved because this will easily fit into my workflow and replace many different applications like

  • google calendar iOS app
  • iCal desktop/iOS app
  • Calendy Web app

Want to get 10% off of calendy after the 14 day free trial?

Go [[Here]] and use code: TALLGUYJENKS-TEN-1YEAR

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How I Put My Mind Under Version Control

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Using Github and command-line utilities to sync and version control my Zettelkasten

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So I use Obsidian as my app of choice to curate my ZettelKasten.

I keep my vault on iCloud for storage and redundancy but on other machines like my firewalled work machine, I can't access iCloud but I can access GitHub. So I have my vault set up as a repository on GitHub. To keep all my notes, configs, and workspace settings in sync with my home machine when I leave the house I set up auto-syncing to GitHub that I can take advantage of anywhere. Here's how I did it:

Prepare Your Repository


0.

You need git installed, and this works seamlessly if you have your credentials cached so you do not need to enter your password on git push commands for more on caching FCC has a great article on this.

to store your credentials for your system you can use this command to be prompted for your credentials, enter them once, and have them stored for future git interaction:

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1.

Next we need to make an empty repo on GitHub to host our ZettelKasten where we can push and pull changes, to across multiple machines, and have version control on our notes.

2.

We need to Ignore files that are unnecessary and could cause errors on other machines when we pull our files and configs from GitHub. If you work on a ZettelKasten with a team excluding the .obsidia/workspace file could also be a good idea as well as the custom CSS in the root directory if you have one. This would mean people are not overriding each other's personal settings unless you want to keep this consistent in the shared vault. Which files to exclude are up to you and your use case but for mine, the repo is private and only for myself so I need only a few files ignored to avoid issues.

3.

So now to make the .gitignore file to make git… well… ignore the files we don't care about:

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4.

Now that we have the remote repo ready and we are ignoring local files that could cause issues if sent to GitHub, let's make our existing ZettelKasten a git repository so we have something to send to GitHub:

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5.

Now push everything to the remote repository so we can pull it down from GitHub onto any machine. Make sure in the example below to just replace the URL with your GitHub Repository URL or you can just replace the parts of the URL in all caps with the values of your Username on GitHub and the name of the repository:

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This will put your files on GitHub ONCE now any new changes to files or configurations need to be manually pushed to the remote repo with git commands manually. So now let's automate all the work.

Automating The Workflow

6.

First we need to write a script that will perform all of our actions for us. I make a shell script in my .local/bin/ directory (this works for Mac and Linux, Windows I'm not sure if this works the same with WSL/Gitbash):

touch creates the file named zk_sync and chmod +x makes the file an executable file, but we still need to say what shell will execute this file, and what exactly are the commands to be executed.

7.

The scripts contents to be executed when ran:

In case it needs to be said, you’ll need to update the string that is the absolute path to your local ZettelKasten repo. You can easily do this by using the terminal to go to that directory and just run the `pwd` command.

In case it needs to be said, you’ll need to update the string that is the absolute path to your local ZettelKasten repo. You can easily do this by using the terminal to go to that directory and just run the `pwd` command.

8.

WHAT THE SCRIPT DOES. You should never run a script without knowing what it does as it could easily be malicious and nuke your machine. So lets review its functionality line by line:

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9.

So now that we have the script ready, enter CRON! We're going to set up a cron job to run this script automatically on a timer.

On Linux I used the tool cronie, but MacOS comes with cron installed already, to get into your list of current cron jobs:

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my cronjob looks like this:

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*/30 * * * * The first section is the timers, mine is set to run on every minute interval that is divisible by 30 i.e. 30 and 60 or 1:30PM, 2PM, 2:30PM, etc.

/Users/bryanjenks/.local/bin/zk_sync The second is what file is it executing (absolute path) which in this case is the script we made.

Finally, to make sure the job is quiet it is sending any script output (there shouldn't be any we used -q a lot) to >/dev/null 2>&1

Now any changes I make to anything in my vault are pushed to GitHub every 30 minutes with an ISO timestamp for the files with changes. If no changes are made, nothing happens.

I keep the repo private, and this way I always have my ZettelKasten available where ever I go and under version control with Git.

I hope someone else enjoys the workflow 🙂️

Quick Summary of What We Covered

A Quick Recap of the main points of this article:

  • Create a GitHub Repo
  • Make your current ZettelKasten a local Git Repo
  • Push that repo to your new fresh remote repo
  • Create a script to sync your local and remote repo's
  • Automate that scripts execution with Cron


Code?

If you would like all the example code used in the video / this article you can grab it:

Get the Code Here

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