ReadItLater Plugin for Obsidian

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Content Types
  • Website Article
  • Youtube
  • Youtube Channel
  • Twitter
  • Bluesky
  • Stack Exchange
  • Pinterest
  • Mastodon
  • Vimeo
  • Bilibili
  • TikTok
  • Text Snippet
• API

Introduction

Save the web with ReadItLater plugin for Obsidian. Archive web pages for reading later, referencing in your second brain or for other flexible use case Obsidian provides.

ReadItLater can do a lot more than converting web pages to markdown. For every content type there is specific template with carefully selected variables to ease up your archiving process.

What makes ReadItLater plugin great?

• Simple, but powerful template engine
• Carefully selected predefined template variables to straightforward archiving process
• Compatibility with Obsidian iOS and Android apps
• Downloading images from articles to your Vault
• Batch processing of URLs list

How to use ReadItLater plugin?

To create single note you can either click on the plugin ribbon icon, select ReadItLater: Create from clipboard from command palette or click on ReadItLater shortcut in context or share menu. You can also create multiple notes from batch of URLs, delimited by selected delimiter in plugin settings using ReadItLater: Create from batch in clipboard command.

If you want just add content to existing note, you can use ReadItLater: Insert at the cursor position command to insert content after the current cursor position.

Template engine

ReadItLater provides for every content type dedicated template that can be edited in plugin settings.

Variables

Variables are rendered in template using familiar syntax {{ content }}. Nested data types can be accessed using dot notation {{ author.name }}.

Filters

Variables output can be modified using filters. Filters are separated by | symbol. Filters can be chained, so output of the previous is passed to the next.

{{ 'hello world'|capitalize}}

outputs: Hello world

{{ 12682|numberLexify}}

outputs: 12.6K

{{ 'Hello World'|lower}}

outputs: hello world

{{ 'Hello world'|replace('o') }}

outputs: Hell wrld

{{ 'Hello World'|upper}}

outputs: HELLO WORLD

Inbox and Assets directories

You can use template variables in Inbox dir and Assets dir settings to better distribute content in your Vault.

Content Types

Structure of note content is determined by URL. Currenty plugin supports saving content of websites and embedding content from multiple services. Each content type has title and note template with replacable variables, which can be edited in plugin settings.

Available content types are ordered by URL detection priority.

Website Article

Will be parsed to readable form using Mozilla Readability and then converted to markdown. In case website content is marked by Readbility as not readable, empty note with URL will be created.

If enabled, images will be downloaded to folder (default is ReadItLater Inbox/assets) configured in plugin settings. (Supported only on desktop for now)

Youtube

Parsing of HTML DOM has its limitations thus additional data can be fetched only from Google API. Retrieved API key can be set in plugin settings and then plugin will use the Google API for fetching data.

Youtube Channel

X.com (Twitter)

Parser use X Publish API to fetch data.

Bluesky

Parser fetch the content from Bluesky API.

If enabled in plugin settings, you can fetch also replies.

Reply template variable

Stack Exchange

Note template variables

Answer template variables

Pinterest

Mastodon

If enabled in plugin settings, you can fetch also replies.

Reply template variable

Vimeo

Bilibili

TikTok

Text Snippet

If your clipboard content is not recognized by any of above parsers plugin will create note with unformatted clipboard content.

API

To invoke functionality from other plugins we provide an API. You can access it via this.app.plugins.plugins['obsidian-read-it-later'].api which is an instance of ReadItLaterAPI class defined in src/ReadItLaterApi.ts.