I’ve got things into a bit of a mess and I need to complete a big cleanout. The root cause, as I was thinking about it at 4 am this morning, is The Quantum Garden Website. Right now, there are notes for books, movies, tv shows and video games that are little more than a cover/poster, the plot and a rating; and for those part of a series, the series as well.
There is a pressure within me to record everything I do, and to create. The recording takes a disproportionate amount of time, and an absurd amount of time compared to the utility. With a website on top, where everything can be easily shared, the problem gets worse.
The state of play
Screen shot of the books index page
Above is the books index page. It looks great, is created automatically from the list of book pages, and auto-sizes covers as needed. When I start reading a new book, I need to:
- Find the Goodreads page for the book
- Capture information using the Obsidian Web Clipper (title, author, published, cover, etc.)
- Use one plugin to convert the cover image URL to a local file
- Use another plugin to convert the local file to WEBP format
- Rename to image to match my standard format
- Replace the
imageproperty URL with the local link - Move the image to the
assets\covers - And, if the book is part of a series, set the
seriesandsequencevalues, optionally creating the book series if needed.
Add to all of this a complex backend for generating the public index page above and you can start to see the utility falls. Who really cares what I rate a book. I don’t in as much as I know which are my ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ and ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ rated items already. A ⭐️⭐️⭐️ item doesn’t need to be tracked.
Poor quality information
Further, I am violating Don’t duplicate public knowledge on everything that is no my rating or my short review. I’m not great at reviews. Even for the higher ratings my review boils down to “because I liked it.” Most of the 88 books hinted to above do not have any commentary at all.
Obsidian isn’t helping
Obsidian compounds the problem by being too damn powerful. It’s super easy to add a new property and build a database of something. There are tools for that. I’m already using Calibre, calibre-web, Plex, and Audiobookshelf as my point of truth databases. Why duplicate information even in my own systems?!
And let’s not even mention Obsidian bases. The newly introduced database tools that can slice and dice pages any way I like. Here is the equivalent book index view native within Obsidian.
Book index in bases “card” view.
I can’t display bases on the website. Instead, for something like a book series page, I have a base (which doesn’t display) and use Obsidian Dataview Serializer plugin to create public version for the website. This means I have the same information displayed in two separate was on a single note, and it’s dubious if I even need it in the first place.
The initial trigger for this whole piece was the noise created by my internal index bases matching external indexes. I had to think of which I was looking at Obsidian’s quick switcher.
Coding effort
The Quantum Garden Website is generated using a substantially modified version of Quartz. I estimate 95% of the time and 80% of the code changes I’ve made have been to present books, movies, etc., on the site so they look pretty. It’s time that I could have spent elsewhere.
The cleanup
Everything is a journey and it’s been a series of small decision steps over the last fortnight which have led me to the conclusion I need a big clean out of media-related pages.1
- Unless I have a substantial review or notes, the media page and associated cover will go
- Public index pages will be deleted from the vault and the website. My internal Obsidian base copies are more powerful.
- It is nice to have the covers, even in The Quantum Garden Vault so I will likely keep that process described above. I will wait to see what the impact is after deleting the superfluous copies.
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ and ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ items of all types will be listed on a series of My favourites pages where I list the item and describe in a paragraph why it is important to me. It achieves the same level of meaning with far less work.
At the end of this note I’m happy with that approach. It feels cleaner and I have a sense of my important notes being seen through the trees.