Obsidian Web Chrome Extension

All of us discover interesting or useful things on the internet that we want to be able to find later; only some of us are able to do that without becoming a browser tab hoarder. What the Obsidian Web Chrome extension does is allow you to easily send information about your current tab to your notes in Obsidian so you can free up your valuable, but limited, cognitive bandwidth for whatever tasks are important to you right now and trust that you’ll be able to find your precious link later.

Main features include:

  • Built-in templates for adding information (e.g. the URL, page title, currently selected text) from your current browser tab to your daily notes, capturing the entire page’s content of the current page as markdown, and more.
  • Support for changing the existing built-in templates and creating your own using the Handlebars template language.
  • Support for creating new files in your notes, appending to an existing note, and inserting content under a particular header in one of your existing notes.
  • Periodic note support, too – you can easily add content to your current daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual note.
  • This interacts with Obsidian via the Local REST API plugin so you have access to the full breadth of functionality supported there for how this content appears in your notes.

Hopefully you find this as useful as I do for making note of useful pages on the internet so I can get back to whatever my actual priorities are at that moment confident that I’ll be able to find this link later.

17 Likes

Do you have plans to add a Firefox extension as well? (I have no idea how easy it would be to port.)

3 Likes

No active plans, but the extension right not is using Chrome’s MV3, so creating a Firefox version should be pretty easy if there were enough folks interested in that.

6 Likes

Cool Plug, but the append under header-thingy doesn’t work. (API works fine and appending to daily note also works fine). “Patch” doesn’t work, the plugin seems to lose the given heading-ID when I save in the options panel.

This “Reading Log” will be lost at saving:

Works fine here. Excellent addition to this fine program.

The ability to select a folder to send the new note to would be great.

Would love to see a Firefox extension as well.

2 Likes

Good news: that’s already possible if you edit or create a new template and change the URL its sending data to.

1 Like

I’m afraid it’s just that “Headers” here just doesn’t mean quite what you’re guessing. The fields you’re looking at there are the HTTP request fields that will be sent off to Obsidian, and they have meanings that are clear for folks who are used to making HTTP requests, but probably not for anybody else – it’s really not that complicated, though. In this particular case, the Headers field is for setting HTTP headers when interacting with the API. What headers are valid there depends on what exactly you’re trying to do, but they are particularly useful for the PATCH method you mentioned. If you want to add a heading, just add it to the “Content” section as normal Markdown.

Regarding PATCH – it is used for inserting content in places other than the end of your file; you can find documentation about how to use it here (once github is back up again): Local Rest API for Obsidian: Interactive API Documentation. If you wanted to use this tool such that it inserts your content after an existing heading named “Reading Log” (but before whatever heading follows it), you could type the value Heading: Reading Log into that “Headers” field.

I figured it out. Excellent!

Awesome, this worked just fine. Many thanks!

This looks awesome and is soo tempting
Before jumping in can someone who knows about I.T. Security please explain the security risks while using this plugin?

I understand the reward, but it looks like there is a bit of risk too.
Opening up an insecure port to the internet with read\write\delete access to my vault and the personal information it contains is scary.

I’m technical enough to know to stop and think about it. But not technical enough to assess the risks properly.

Some questions that would be great in a FAQ:

  • How much am I trusting @coddingtonbear by using this?
  • What’s the worst that could happen?
  • Could it be used by hackers to access my vault? What would they need to know to do that?
  • How can I make it more secure?

An FAQ to these questions, even if they are just pointers to guides that explain it would be helpful for people to know before either being scared away or jumping into the water headfirst.

And if it is a bit dicey - just outline the risks so people know what they’re risking and don’t come crying to you afterwards.

1 Like

Another vote for Firefox here, this looks like it could very neatly solve a problem of mine. Single-handedly almost tempting me back to Chrome, to be honest.

Thank you for making this!

If you add the self-signed HTTPS certificate provided with the plugin to your browser, you don’t have to use an insecure port.

2 Likes

Are there any plans to include shortcuts for the various actions (or maybe they are already there but I have completely missed them)?

I have this use case because I am using a stream deck and would like to be able to clip with just one button on my stream deck. I have currently setup the templates and those all work well. I now have a series of key presses that fire the extension, pick the template and shit enter (and a bunch of other keys) but it never executes reliably.

I would be very pleased to have an option to assign a shortcut to a template so that I can activate the extension (ctrl+shift+O) and select and execute the template with a second shortcut.

The current solution looks like this, and it is not reliable:

could you explain how to do this, where to take this certificate from and how to add it to the browser so it works?

Hi!
Nice Chrome-Obsidian extension
Could you please tell me if there is a possibility to also extract the Channel name & description from for instance a YouTube video?
The most important is the Channel name if possible. Thanks