- Some of these topics are reference books with great value in the thoughts that are crafted into them. Problem is they are not indexed or organized in a manner that makes them quick to navigate. I often recall a topic and remember a particular post that stood out but have to go scroll and scan through the topic. Yep, it’s our not so good friend, friction.
- I’ve been thinking lately about extracting them into Obsidian as a learning tool to not only parse and peruse but also illustrate how to develop a workflow for bringing longish form content into Obsidian and how to either atomize it up or somehow make it easier to use and link and think with.
- Is there a way to export a topic into Obsidian. I’ve tried MarkdownLoad, but am unable to get it to parse effectively; I suspect the dom in Discourse is not amenable to this sort of shredding. If there is built in functionality, where is it? Maybe it’s configurable by admin?
- Got ideas or solutions?
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Nice idea! I think it would be extremely helpful. Check out this feature request: Ability to download a synced version of entire forum as vault
I also was trying to do something similar with all the release notes, attempting to keep track of some of the minor but quite helpful tricks that don’t make the front page of the help vault. I understand that not every way of accomplishing a task needs to be presented simultaneously in the help as it would be overload for beginners, but it wouldn’t hurt to have some sort of legacy index that tracked everything that is or was ever possible in the software. Like you said, Obsidian would be the best place to build such documentation.
Maybe, I should have set the request in the Plugins or Meta categories. Who knows, maybe someone will build a script and occasionally upload an updated vault of the forum to the forum or GitHub every once in a while. That would be awesome.
Thanks!
Overwhelming comes to mind with having the entire forum in a vault but no doubt there would be incredible insight if the topics and posts are related in such a way they could be analyzed. I like your fearless attitude @I-d-as !
There is command functionality at the admin level in Discourse for export of topic(s) to json but that puts a burden on the admin. Exposing that to the user level would probably inundate the backend server. Maybe another avenue is whether or not discourse allows for some tailoring of the dom so that it can be shredded by MarkdownLoad or other means. But doing that probably would affect the great appearance we have in this browser experience … hmmm … I’m gonna go chase … is there a desktop Discourse app?
For the time being, I’m gonna use Readwise on a handful of topics.
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