I’m migrating my save-for-later system to Obsidian. I’ve used Notion databases for this in the past, but Obsidian is basically a Markdown frontend and doesn’t have an out-of-the-box equivalent. This is what happens when you just share links to the Obsidian app in Android:

https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-thing https://writethatblog.substack.com/p/simon-willison-on-technical-blogging https://openai.com/index/inside-our-in-house-data-agent/

Works, but I can immediately think of 3 major issues:

  • New links are added to the end of the file, so the most recent links are at the bottom
  • Marking articles as read is clunky
  • Raw URLs don’t tell you much at a glance

Fortunately, what Obsidian lacks in features, it shines in interoperability - which is why we can use a separate app to handle link capturing. There are several apps that fit the bill, here’s how you do it with MacroDroid, a simple but powerful IFTTT-style Android toolkit.

Here’s how I set it up:

  1. Open MacroDroid and create a new Macro
  2. Set the Trigger to Text Shared to MacroDroid (optionally filter with regex ^http.* to only capture URLs)
  3. Add the Action Write to File
  4. For Filename, locate your Obsidian vault and choose your input file
  5. For Enter text, use - [ ] [{shared_text_subject}]({shared_text})\n — MacroDroid will replace {shared_text_subject} with the page title and {shared_text} with the URL
  6. Choose Prepend to file so newest links appear at the top
  7. Save the Macro and share a link to MacroDroid (not Obsidian!)

Every time you share a link to MacroDroid the new macro will trigger and add it to the top of your file, which you can then open for reading using Obsidian. Here’s how the same list would look now:

Much better! There’s plenty more we could do here (tags, archives, cleanup macros), but personally I’m quite happy with this for now. In the spirit of aggressive self-awareness - these are problems I don’t have yet.