Just sharing a web clipper workflow similar to Notion's or Evernote's

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I got used to my web clippers clipping articles for my future readings before on Pocket, then Evernote, then Notion, and wanted a similar system for Obsidian now that I’m moving to it from Notion. Before I direct these to an “Inbox”, and then process it at least weekly by moving to a corresponding notebook, reading, taking notes, etc.

So after looking at markdown clippers, found this: MaoXian web clipper,Saving images localStorage

Here’s the links for it:


Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/maoxian-web-clipper/
Chrome - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/maoxian-web-clipper/kjahokgdcbohofgdidndeiaigkehdjdc

I feel like it should be recognized more since it really is a good one. It can even save images with fairly unique IDs (seems to be based on base64 conversion). And you can save it directly to your Obsidian vault too.

Now I don’t have an Inbox, since I use a flat structure for markdown files. But I found I can process the files since I see them by date, and can see the orphaned nodes. Another that I just learned right now is I can customize the default front matter and include a tag automatically. Which makes finding them easier.

So my work flow is like this.

  1. I click the clip button on the task bar, and then clip the entire article. I don’t bother putting in tags or categories on the pop-up.
  2. The markdown file with a $YYYY-$MM-$DD-$TITLE.md format is saved to my root folder. The images with unique IDs are saved in assets/images.
  3. I just review these notes and tag/backlink/make notes appropriately.

To set this up:
Setting Customizations

image
image1018×512 10.1 KB

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image1490×934 31.7 KB

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image1262×1038 54.9 KB

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image1716×628 33.3 KB

So what the above does is save the clipping to markdown, and it saves your markdown file to a folder named “mx-wc” by default in your Downloads folder.

So to redirect this to your Obsidian vault here’s the steps:

  1. First delete the mx-wc folder. We’re going to replace it with a symlink.
  2. Symlink your vault to your Downloads folder. ln -s /Users/user/Documents/Obsidian-Vault ~/Downloads/mx-wc

And then it’s done! :smiley: Get automatically stored web clippings. Super kudos to the one who did that web clipper extension.

*I’ve only tested this for a day or so with about 10+ web clippings in my vault. So far had no conflicts or issues at all. To be fair, I do use Git so I felt like I wouldn’t have sync issues. It might be safer to do this in another vault though if you still feel unsure about this method!

An alternate method would be:

  1. Just leave the mx-wc folder in your downloads folder. And copy paste the markdown files and the assets folder to your vault manually. This is the safer method if anything.
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