Obsidian Bases

I know Obsidian added Bases almost a year ago, but I recently started using them at work and for my blogging, and wow. They're far more powerful and useful than I originally thought they were. Even as I begin writing this, I'm finding new things I can do with them.

At work, over the last couple years I've been creating a note for every ticket and bug I work on. I take notes of what I worked on, what I changed, any database changes, etc. I keep track of any commits and pull requests I make as well as the name of the branch for each environment. It might seem a little overkill, but I've found the info useful from time to time. On a whim I decided to create a base for my these notes and I was pleasantly surprised with how I was able to configure the base to give me a view for the tickets I've worked on. Once I realized some of the neat things I could do, I started adding some new properties to all my old notes. The neat thing there was that it wasn't all that difficult as adding them from the base would add the front matter property with the value if it wasn't present. Needless to say I now have a nice view of all my work tickets and where they currently stand in the development process.

Not to keep this newfound magic confined to work, I decided I'd start using bases to help keep track of my blog posts, notes, and week notes. Needless to say, my blog posts are all over the place. I've improved upon the front matter I put in almost all my notes over time, especially those destined to become blog posts, but the data goes back several years which means the front matter is all sorts of unaligned. Some posts have the date created property, some don't. Some have the date created property as created date, some have it as create date, others still have it as date created. Woof. I ended up opening the folder in VS Codium and used the global find and replace tool to try to standardize a bunch of the properties. Fortunately it seemed to work and it made it a little bit easier to help manage and organize the notes. I still have a ton of old blog posts to go through, but the upside is that it's giving me a chance to go through old posts and add tags, standardize the front matter and just get my blog posts better organized as a whole. I'm not entirely sure how exactly I'll use the end result here, especially for older, published posts, but organization can't hurt, right?

You can read more about bases from Obsidian's oficial help page and the Obsidian Rocks Getting Started with Bases page.

And the best part is that while the bases might be Obsidian-specific, it still just works off your markdown files. You own the actual content. At its core, it's still just a folder full of markdown files. And that's what I want. I don't want to be tied to a product or a service. If Obsidian ever enshittifies, I want to be able to take my notes and go. I might lose the bases, but I'll keep the content.