Obsidian allows me to set properties on notes. I rely on them extensively as metadata because they:
- help me relate to notes over time
- speed linking through aliases
- direct Quartz on how to build The Quantum Garden Website website
Consistency in how I apply properties increases their value.
| Name | Comment | Multiple Values |
|---|---|---|
| aliases | Note link aliases within Obsidian. See Quantum OS Acceptable Use of Aliases. | Y |
| author | A book or article’s author(s). A movie’s director. May be plain text or a link. | Y |
| created | Original date and time of an artefact and typically the date of first creation by myself. This is not the same as published which represents another creator’s date. If only year is known, set to year-01-01 and if time unknown, set to midnight. | N |
| css-classes | Specific formatting changes within Obsidian. | Y |
| description | For automatically generated pages, a description to override the automatically generated excerpt. | N |
| domain | A domain of knowledge or operation. Used for categorising software and tools. | Y |
| host | A server host, typically for a Docker container. | N |
| image | The cover image of a book, the poster of a game of movie, or an image associated with an article. May be a url or a local file. Used most frequently in Obsidian Dataview plugin tables.1 | N |
| JDEX-Area | Link to a Johnny.Decimal area. | N |
| JDEX-Category | Link to a Johnny.Decimal category. Must be paired with JDEX-Storage. | N |
| JDEX-ID | Link to a Johnny.Decimal ID. | N |
| JDEX-Storage | Link to locations where notes in the Johnny.Decimal system are stored. Must be paired with JDEX-Category. | Y |
| kanban-plugin | Operational property for the Kanban (Obsidian Plugin). | N |
| landscapes | Originally used to tag notes to Landscapes. Will be removed. | Y |
| location | A location where I’ve lived. Every Journal entry must have a location. I don’t track where the journal entry was written, just where I was living at the time. | N |
| map-coordinates | Every location has coordinates. Used by the Map (Obsidian plugin). | N |
| map-icon | The icon of a location. Used by the Map (Obsidian plugin). | N |
| map-icon-colour | The colour of a map-icon. Used by the Map (Obsidian plugin). Where I currently live is green. All others are red. | N |
| modified | The date and time an artefact was meaningfully updated and it’s deemed worth recording the time of update. | N |
| platform | Link to the gaming platform for a video game.2 | Y |
| platinum_date | The date I achieved the Platinum Trophy for a video game. | N |
| platinum_duration | The calculated duration between beginning a video game and achieving the Platinum Trophy. | N |
| processed | Indicator that a source has been processed for notes and integration. Will likely change to #status/draft. | N |
| publish | Used by Quartz to filter out pages from publication on The Quantum Garden Website. Only pages in the public vault folder are candidates for publication, but then only pages where publish = true are published no matter where the file is stored. | N |
| rating | Link to a rating from Quantum OS Ratings. Always link to the alias of the target rating page so that stars are shown. | N |
| recommender | The person who recommended a source to me. | N |
| registration | Number plate of a car tracked as a note. | N |
| sequence | An item’s sequence place within a series. | N |
| series | Link to the series a source belongs to. | N |
| slashname | Used by Quartz for The Quantum Garden Website. | |
| tags | Note tags. See Quantum OS Tagging Conventions. | Y |
| title | Alternative page title. Used when filename does not allow wanted characters. For sources, which are named with author and year, this is the simplified source title. | N |
| uri | A unique value applied to #class/blog entries used by Quartz when generating the RSS feed file. There are two variants. Prior to 2025-02-08, URI was a slug based on the blog post’s title but this could change over time. Following, the URI follows the tag URI scheme | N |
| url | A URL pointing to an external site. | N |
| year | A source, book or movies year of publication. | N |
Dates are time zone agnostic
Times used in date properties, and throughout the system in general, are time zone agnostic. Most can be assumed personal to me and so UTC+10:00 (or +11:00 during Daylight Savings).
Change log
2024-05-24 - replaced publishDate with datetime to give me a distinction between dates without a known time and dates with a time. The use of date and datetime is consistent with programming language conventions. I find it easier to read and solves the problem of missing times which publishDate would also suffer from. As articles are updated I will progressively move from date to datetime. Added updated as a standard property.
2024-05-25 - remove growth as a marker of article maturity. See The value of growth maturity in a digital garden is marginal and Quartz > Removal of growth status for pages for more information.
2024-08-03 - remove landscapes as a required property. Moving away from these to focus more direct meaningful links. Landscapes as a property are a crutch. They still exist as a Landscapes for broadly organising the Universal Map of Concepts and the first level of items below it.
2026-04-02 - Full realignment of properties in this list with what is actually in use.
2026-04-03 - Removed published as a duplicate of year.
Footnotes
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For an example see Platinum Trophy. ↩
-
See Video gaming ↩