Properties2
| Type | Practice |
| Note created | May 29, 2025 |
Readwise is a service that provides a central place to store highlights and notes in different documents like articles, books or podcasts and YouTube videos. I enjoy the simplicity of it, and how easy it is to integrate with other services like an Obsidian vault. For the Digital Garden, Readwise acts as a bridge to include all relevant parts of articles, podcasts and books I consume to store in Obsidian.
Set up
The integration is quite simple, and for a basic setup is as easy as installing the Readwise plugin for Obsidian and enabling it via browser using your Readwise account. The configuration below is simply used to address some nitpicks and customize the structure of my files.
Modifying the file format
In the browser, you can edit the way the notes are generated based on your highlights. The configuration below is the one I use for the Reference folder in the Digital Garden.
Page title
First off, I like the Readwise folder to be called Reference, and I use a custom file name to remove new lines in the titles: {{ title|replace("\n", " ") }}. This is a strange occurrence and should be sanitized in Reader most of the times, but I like to account for it in the plugin as well.
Highlight
I like to move the location outside of the highlight text, and set the tags as code blocks instead of regular Obsidian tags.
> {{ highlight_text }}
{% if highlight_location and highlight_location_url %}
- [{{highlight_location}}]({{highlight_location_url}}){% elif highlight_location %}
- {{highlight_location}}{% endif %}{% if highlight_tags %}
- _Tags_: {% for tag in highlight_tags %} `{{tag}}` {% endfor %}{% endif %}{% if highlight_note %}
- _Note_: {{ highlight_note }}{% endif %}{% if highlight_location or highlight_tags or highlight_note %}
{% endif %}
---
A lot of effort has been put on the newlines being applied correctly after the highlight – much more than what was worth it.
YAML front matter
In the front matter, I try to add as much data as possible, since the Bases plugin does take advantage of the files metadata.
{% set type_map = {"books": "book", "articles": "article", "tweets": "tweet", "podcasts": "podcast"} %}
type: {{ type_map.get(category, "") }}
aliases:
- "{{ full_title.replace('"', '\"').replace("'", "\'").replace("\n", " ") }}"
- "\"{{ full_title.replace('"', '').replace("'", "\'").replace("\n", " ") }}\" by {{author}}"
tags: resource, highlights
url: {{url}}
author:
{%- for author in author.split(',') %}
- "[[{{author.strip().strip('"')}}]]"
{%- endfor %}
source: {{source}}
date: {{published_date}}
Usage
Annotations
The idea of the Reference folder is that is completely managed by Readwise – I don’t write anything there at all. All ideas, relations and complements are:
- Added straight to Readwise as highlight notes,
- Added as a separate note to the Digital Garden.
That way, I can easily delete the whole folder to force a re-sync with Readwise if I want to change the format at any given time.
Bases plugin
Bases allows me to have a dynamic list of all the reference material, that is possible to filter and view at a glance. This is stored in the Reference.base file, that can be embedded in different places by using different views.