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💡 The Big Idea: Adding an On This Day Feature to Your Daily Notes with Bases

After a bit of a rocky start, Bases continues to improve. Now that the syntax is no longer changing beneath me, I feel it's safe to start spending some serious time with the newest member of the Obsidian family.

As I do, I'm often amazed at what this not-so-little core plugin can do.

So this week, I used it to create a dynamic On This Day section in my Daily Note template file.

If you're not familiar with Bases, it's a new Obsidian core plugin that is currently available in the Insider releases available to Catalyst supporters. It basically brings Notion-type database capabilities to a collection of Obsidian notes, which is useful for putting together things like book or video game libraries.

Here's an example of what it looks like from all the book notes I have in my vault (I'll be adding all 217 of these to LifeHQ shortly):

With Bases, you can set up different views for looking at your notes based on filters that you set up. Currently, there are only two types of views:

• Table - shows each note as a row in a table
• Cards - shows each note as a card in a grid (like my book notes image above)

This one gets pretty technical, and code snippets don't show up well in newsletters (😂), so I recommend you read this one on my website if you want to know how to set it up for yourself.

Here's what my Bases code does:

• It only looks at notes in the Daily Notes folder
• It creates a function using the formula up above called on_this_day
• It renames the display names for the files to Daily Note
• It creates a Table view named On This Day
• It applies the formula as a filter
• It sorts the results in descending order (newest notes at the top)

The end result is that I can now create a new Daily Note, and the date tokens get replaced by the dates associated with that Daily Note, creating a historical On This Day section at the bottom.

😎 Something Cool: Iconic

I love plugins that let you customize the look of Obsidian in small ways. And Iconic is a plugin that just got an update that does exactly that, letting you select new icons for folders, files, bookmarks, and even metadata properties.

Just install and enable the plugin, then click on an icon to change it. You can choose from 1,700+ included Lucide icons, assign them custom colors, or choose from any of the emojis your device supports.

I haven't gone crazy with colors yet, but here’s what it looks like in my File Explorer using the plugin to set custom icons for my folders:

There are a lot of things you can customize with this plugin, including whether you want your custom icons to replace the standard folder arrow icons. You can even set file and folder rules in the plugin settings that add colors or icons based on certain file properties.

If you want a way to add some icons and/or color to your Obsidian vault, check out Iconic.

📚 Book Notes: Lean Learning by Pat Flynn

I’ve been following Pat Flynn online for almost 10 years. In fact, Smart Passive Income was one of the first shows that I listened to regularly when I first discovered podcasts back in the day.

Pat has an interesting story, where he sort of stumbled into selling things online after he got let go from his architectural job. But in addition to building his massive Smart Passive Income brand, he also started a second YouTube channel called Deep Pocket Monster that has grown to almost 2 million subscribers. Building a large following online is hard to do, but Pat has effectively done it twice now with two totally unrelated channels.

In Lean Learning, he shares the mindset that has helped him figure things out by learning less. As a chronic overthinker, his emphasis on just-in-time learning is exactly what I needed to hear. If you could use some help navigating the chaos of information overload, you’ll want to pick this one up.

We just covered this one for Bookworm, so if you want to hear Cory & I discuss this book in detail, check out the podcast episode here. And if you want to download my mind map book notes, click here.

— Mike