Anthony, who is a Patreon supporter, left a long comment on the last episode of the podcast.

He asked many interesting questions concerning the timeline system, which I plan to gradually respond to.

Here’s the first one.

You seem to have a template with a list of standard properties.

Can you explain if you use this everywhere and how it adapts to different node types?

Very interesting question.

And by the way, if you cannot support me on Patreon right now, I invite you to subscribe to the free tier.

I’m constantly sharing free content there and it’s a great way to keep in touch.

Okay, let’s talk about properties.

Let’s start with where the templates are.

I keep them inside a static container parent folder.

They are inside a folder I call templates just to make things easier.

I currently have three templates.

I wish I had only one.

I tried that.

It didn’t work.

But the three I have are kind of one in disguise.

You soon understand why.

And one thing I myself understand, internalize, is that things change all the time.

So do I have three templates right now?

I’m pretty sure I’ll change them.

I’ll tweak them along the way.

Again, I’ve been using this three for a long time now.

I haven’t changed them for a long time.

So let’s start with the one that I call pure.

This was the last one I created.

I noticed that eventually I would need a template with nothing, just a blank page.

And I needed that because I use the auto template trigger.

There is a video on the channel explaining how to use the auto template trigger.

So it’s a pop-up window and I have to choose one of the templates.

So that’s why I created the pure template, which has nothing.

It’s just a blank note.

The other one I created before that one, it was not the first one.

The second one I created was blog post because I have my blog on Obsidian.

It’s not my blog.

In fact, it’s my entire website.

There’s also a video on the channel explaining how I did that.

But Obsidian has Obsidian Publish, which is the tool to let you publish your website using Obsidian, has a set of properties that you can use to create a lot of things on a website.

For example, if you are familiar with a blog, permalinks is a property.

The cover art is a property.

There are so many things that are the tags.

You can use the tags to filter content on your website.

So there are many properties and there’s an entire section of the Obsidian documentation page explaining how to use those properties.

So I created a template with all the possible properties that you can use on an Obsidian Publish page plus all the properties that I had on the other template that I was using.

You’ll soon see that one, the one I use for all my notes.

This was my first attempt to have only one template and I can do it because you soon see that I also have in this template here all the properties that I use on the other one.

But I don’t know why I’m still thinking about this.

Why not use only this one instead of using this one and the other one that I’ll show you next?

I don’t know.

I don’t have the answer for that.

What probably will happen in the future is that this will be my main template and I’ll also keep the pure template for blank notes.

And you can see there are some codes here which generate the date, automatically generate the date.

There are many videos about this.

You’ll find all the videos in the description below.

And this is where I will start answering Anthony’s question.

What I’m trying to do here is come up with a template that has all the properties that I need.

So I’ll only have one template, in this case two, the main template and the blank template, the pure template.

I know that for some people that’s not going to work because some people will feel the urge to fill all the blanks.

That’s not my case.

If that’s your case, the only option that I can see is create multiple templates with different properties.

But in my case, that would be unnecessary friction because I would have to remember which is the template for whatever it is that I’m trying to do on that note.

You’ll soon see that I filter the information, what the note is, using the type property.

So let’s take a look at the current main template.

I’m going to go through all the properties I have just to, because this is the one I use most of the time.

So this template is called new note.

And the first property is the title property.

I have this property because Obsidian doesn’t support special characters.

And sometimes I want to add special characters to a note title.

And I want the title to be exactly what I want it to be.

Maybe I want to copy and paste that somewhere.

Maybe I want to read it with the correct characters.

Oh, and by the way, Obsidian Publish doesn’t use the note title as the title of the post, the blog or whatever it is that you’re publishing on a website.

It uses the H1.

So the first hashtag you have on your note, hashtag title, is the title of the post.

The date property creates the date automatically using a setting.

There is a video on the channel explaining how to do that.

You’ll find all the links in the description below.

Then there is the URL.

This one is here basically for the Obsidian Web Clipper.

When I clip a website, this is where the website will, the URL will be.

And going back to the idea of merging the blog post template and this main template, I’ll probably change the web clipper settings that I have today if I merge the two templates and make the URL of the website go to the permalink property instead.

It’s not the same thing.

If you know what a permalink is, you know that URL and permalink are not exactly the same thing.

But I don’t see the need for two fields, two properties for addresses, for website address.

So small things like that are keeping me from, for now, are keeping me from merging these two templates.

Then there is locations.

Locations is a property that is used by the map plugin, map view plugin.

There are two or three videos in the channel about that plugin.

I love that plugin.

You have to put the coordinates in this property, and this will plot the note on a map.

Okay, so this is why I have this property.

I don’t use it all the time.

It’s only for trip notes and some other and some journal notes.

But again, I want all the properties I may need inside the note, okay, inside the template.

Then there’s value.

Value is something that I rarely use, but I sometimes use.

It’s for any number.

I mostly use this when I’m taking notes of my runs.

If I run, I want to put how many kilometers I ran, and also for clients, for how much the clients paid for the consulting.

So I use this property.

And this property is here also because there’s this forever upcoming feature that I keep waiting for.

Obsidian will have some sort of small version of the data view plugin.

There’s not a lot of detail explaining how this feature will work, but as I understand it, it will capture values, information from certain properties that you can use to fill a table.

So this property, the value property is here just because of this future feature that never, just seems never to arrive.

But I hope it will arrive at some point.

So this is mostly why this property is here.

Then there is type.

This is a whole video.

Again, there are other videos.

I talk about this.

This is the type of note.

I usually have here blog for blog post, client if it’s a note for a client session.

Client and session are different types of notes.

Client is like the super compact CRM of the client.

I have all the information of the client and session is the session with the client.

So I have multiple types of notes that I add to this type.

And the reason I have this is to filter information.

Then there’s people.

People is mostly for my family and friends.

If someone is related to that note, I’ll add that person’s name or multiple people’s names to a specific note.

And finally, there’s tags.

I think tags is self-explanatory.

It’s just tags.

So how I use this is combining type, people, and tags to filter information.

This is how I do.

So most of the time, I will have tags.

I would say that, yeah, maybe 99.99% of my notes, they have tags.

I will have people.

I’d say all my journal notes, they have people.

They have someone or multiple people on the people, people’s property.

Then there’s type.

Almost all the notes have type because even if it’s not a specific type, even if it is just a note, it will have the note type.

So I like the idea of having these three properties to add information to these three properties most of the time because they help me filter information.

Then value, locations, URL.

Oh, of course, date.

Date is also created.

I think date is, if you follow my work for a while now, you know that date is crucial.

Everything is date.

I need the date information for the timeline system.

So date is always there and it’s automatically created.

Again, value, location, URL, and title, not all the time.

So answering Anthony, these are my three types of templates.

Most of the time, I’m using the new note template.

And the second one I use in terms of quantity is the blog because I’m posting.

I’m constantly posting to the website.

And the pure note, which is a blank note, I don’t use that much, but sometimes I need a blank note, no date, nothing, just a note.

That’s it for this one.

I hope I have answered Anthony’s question.

And leave your question.

You can do that