The Official Obsidian Web Clipper Plugin

The new plugin from Obsidian has souped up my workflow dramatically.

Oct 14, 2024

For the past few years I’ve relied on the unofficial Obsidian web clipper by coddingtonbear, but its limitation meant that I had to do a great deal of editing on imported documents, too niddley and numerous for me to recount here.

But recently, installed the new official Obsidian web clipper, offered in beta by Obsidian, and its like replacing a manual screwdriver with an electric screwdriver.

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First: preparing to add a document to Obsidian.

I pull a great deal of material into Obsidian to annotate. This is in service to my various writing activities.

Imagine I am reading an article online, and I decide that I’d like to read it and annotate it in Obsidian with highlights, sidenotes, and Obsidian references. The sidenotes rely on an implementation of Tufte-style marginal notes developed by TfTHacker (see also this review).

The new plugin needs only a single click — after configuration — to pull in an article to Obsidian. A pop-up appears, like this:

Note at the top the title, in three sections: the date (which I use as the first part of almost all notes in my Obsidian patterns, allowing for by-date sorting), the title (derived from the plugin’s analysis of the webpage), and the author (again, derived by the plugin’s analysis or the webpage).

Gaining direct access to the author — or, in the case of multiple authors, a comma-separated list — is an amazing time saver for me, since I may pull in three, four, or more files a day.

Note also the populating of Obsidian properties, again configurable in the plugin’s settings.

And last, I have set up the plugin so that it formats the note content in a very particular way that follows another set of patterns baked into my Folio system of Obsidian use. I’ll explain that a bit in the next section.

All of these fields are editable prior to pressing the ‘Add to Obsidian’ Button.

Second: the clipped document in Obsidian.

Here’s the top-most part of the clipped example document:

<digression> The reason for the `<br>` HTML is complex: I dislike some of the side effects of making the title of the article a first-level heading. But I do want to be able to reference the title and a series of annotations following it easily, like this:

![[2024-10-13 Residents of a Mobile Home Park Join Forces to Buy Their Community - Anna Kodé#^precis]]

I am consistent in my use of `^precis` as a block reference to the first block in such files. I separate the paragraphs with `<br>`so the entire precis can be addressed as a single block. (The alternative to to make the various paragraph a block quote, which I dislike for other reasons.) </digression>

Here’s an example with multiple authors:

At any rate, leaving those niddley details to one side, clipping the document into Obsidian works fine.

The settings.

Configuring the settings is (relatively) straightforward. Here’s the general settings:

I left all the setting in their defaults, except for toggling `Saved clipped note without opening' it’, since I often embed a note into another and I don’t always want to shift context immediately.

I modified the default template for the import, here called `2024-10-11 hacked’.

This template will ‘create new note’ as indicated.

The note name is interesting. I originally had `{{date}}` which hoped would resolve to the date, as in `2024-10-11` but instead had a full time stamp, including hours and minutes. I created an issue on the Github page for the plugin, and Kepano (CEO of Obsidian) provided the corrected filtered string: `{{date|date:"YYYY-MM-DD"}}`. I confess I don’t know much about these filters. Perhaps I’ll look into that in a subsequent post. He also has a collection of templates for other web pages, like Reddit, other social tools, and things like recipes.

In conclusion

I am saving a great deal of time importing with this plugin. I may create other templates, but my basic use case is pretty much handled by the tweaked version I based on the default.

If I learn anything else of interest regarding the official Obsidian web clipper, I’ll let you know.

Workings