Conveniently create history timeline

Plugins ideas
1

When I make notes I often link them to an extra year note. E.g.

Mesopotamia

Appearance of first written language around [[3100 BC]]

or

Chekhov

Born [[1860]]
Died [[1904]]

My idea with this was that I would eventually create those year notes and find a convenient way to link back to all the notes from which I have linked to the year. This is of course possible, but I wonder if there is a way to automate this - e.g. using Templater or something? For now the only way I have found is to create the year note and then look at all the cases it is mentioned and summarize them manually. This is of course possible, but somewhat tedious.

Additionally, I would like to find a way to put all of them in one Timeline note. Again the only way I have found is manually. Is there a way to do it better?

I know there is this topic:
Historical timeline in Obsidian
And this project:
GitHub - George-debug/obsidian-timeline: Obisdian.md plugin for creating timelines
But neither offers a way to do what I want. They just help with how a manually created timeline would look in the end.

To sum this up I am looking for

  1. a way to kind of automatically create year notes that link back to notes that link to them
  2. a way to automatically add all of those year notes to a timeline note

I’ve only started to use Obsidian recently and I love it, but I am still not super familiar with the existing functionalities and limits of the program and am not a developer.

2

Would the Periodic Notes plugin help with this?

3

Thanks! It looked promising, but for some reason, I am not able to create the timeline (maybe I am missing something). It also only seems to be possible to create the current year automatically.
Ideally, I would have a note with e.g. [[1561]] then I press on that and it automatically uses my year template. From reading the description of Periodic Notes I understood that that should work, but I can’t find out how.

4

perhaps one of the “periodic” videos from this YT search + [ctrl+f “periodic”] will shed some light.

5
  1. Year notes: Enable Settings > Backlinks > Show backlinks in document…. This affects every note.
  2. Timeline note:
    • If using Show backlinks in document…, include a link to the timeline page in each year page (you could make a template).
    • Tag each year page (for example: #years), then embed a search for that tag in your timeline note.
    • Put all the year pages in a folder, and use plugins to list the folder contents in an index page. See Folder Index, the various Folder Note plugins, Zoottelkeeper, and/or Link Indexer for starting points.

There may be other options, but these are some things you could try.