TLDR
A plugin similar to “Zoottelkeeper Plugin” but for adding backlinks to a note would be very desirable.
Queries and Dataview callouts are super useful and extend Obsidian in a number of useful ways, but ideally, I’d like to see the data it gathers embedded in the note so it’s usable on other platforms (eg. in VS Code). One of those basic bits of information that I like to see on notes for “People” and “Places” is the backlinks of the journals that link to that person or place. Currently I display those in Obsidian with a query, but if I’m in a different tool, I see:
TABLE WITHOUT ID file.link AS "Incoming Links"
WHERE contains(file.outlinks, this.file.link)
instead of a list of notes.
I use “Zoottelkeeper Plugin” to automatically create and maintain MOC files. It maintains a list of files in a folder, writing them to the ‘folder file’, making them usable from other systems. It seems the same could be done to maintain backlinks/incoming links. A plugin watches files that have something like:
%% Backlinkkeeper: Beginning of the autogenerated file list %%
%% Backlinkkeeper: End of the autogenerated file list %%
embedded in them, and writes a list of backlinks into that space, following an optional template.
I don’t have the coding skills to put something like this together, but thought I’d throw the idea out there and see if anyone else sees this as useful, and perhaps knows how to make it work. Seems a lot of the necessary code could be based on the Zoottelkeeper Plugin code since much of what it does is the same.
Anyone else think this would be useful?