How to capture note creation metadata

Knowledge management
1

I just started using Obsidian, by pointing it to the big pile of Markdown files that I’ve been maintaining with Sublime Text for several years now.

Up until now, in order to preserve metadata for when a note was created, I format all files as follows: 20190521 - my wonderful note.md

As you can imagine, such filenames don’t make for especially readable links.

What’s the Obsidian-ish way of capturing this metadata within the file? Is it just a matter of adding a created: field as YAML front matter?

2

I discovered that if YAML front matters was not processed. So, if I did something like this:

---
created: 2019-05-21
tags: #wonderful
---

Then #wonderful would not be picked up as a tag.

So, instead, I’ve created a template (using the core plugin) that generates a line like this at the top of the document:

🏷️ 2020-11-12

This allows me to add tags beside the date and seems workable for the moment.

I don’t really use emoji in my notes, so hopefully I’ll be to use regular expressions to revise this slightly hacky way of adding metadata down the line.

How are other folks handling such cases?

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3

Your templates-plus-YAML solution is a great idea.

(Moving this thread to #knowledge-management as I think it’s more suited to the discussions there.)

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4

In general I think your method will be fine. However I could have sworn I read a posting a few days ago about the YAML header, and how it’s intended for plugin use, and best to stay out of it in terms of manual manipulation. I’m sorry I can’t cite the posting at this time. Perhaps @ryanjamurphy can chime in. I could have been reading a since-deprecated position.

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5

I didn’t find the original post I read about YAML section, but I found this one which suggests a safer way to handle your metadata and still avail yourself of the linking capabilities:

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/allow-backlinks-to-work-in-yaml-front-matter-notion-like-database-from-metadata/10052/2

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6

#wonderful was not picked up as a tag because # initiates comment in YAML.

Obsidian recognizes (e.g.)tags in YAML front matter when formulated as described in:

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