Following up on Automating Obsidian
As I alluded to in my thoughts yesterday, I am overthinking my Obsidian automation. That's not a problem, it's a fact. I don't mind overthinking if it is productive, and in this case I think it is.
I wrote in detail about how I'm automating my weekly note review on Tuesday; that's working like a charm now that the bugs have been worked out. This morning though, I was looking at the daily note that Obsidian's plug-in creates for me. I like including the ISO Week number as well as the written date. So today's daily note has a title / filename of 16 Thursday April 17 2025.md. That's great except on a quick glance I keep thinking it's saying it's the 16th. It doesn't look right.
I would like it to be something like Week 16 Thursday April 17 2025.md or even Thursday April 17 2025 Week 16.md. I suppose I don't need to include the week number in there - that's mostly relevant for the weekly review. At the same time, it helps to make sure when I look at the source for the weekly review note, I can quickly verify that yes, all the week numbers match up.
Unfortunately, Obsidian's daily note plug-in is limited when it comes to creating filenames based on dates. I could set the title in the template to include word strings, but that's YAML information, not the filename. What I'm thinking instead is creating a shell script that will do that for me. I already have the basics of what I need to do set up in the script that appends my weekly review file - I can take that and apply it to a new script. Here's what I'm thinking (I haven't written the script yet or uploaded it to my server, at this point we're at the theoretical level).
#!/bin/sh
# Get ISO week number
WEEK_NUM=$(date +%V)
# Get full date parts
DAY_NAME=$(date +%A)
MONTH_NAME=$(date +%B)
DAY_NUM=$(date +%e | sed 's/ //g')
YEAR=$(date +%Y)
# Build daily filename
DAILY_FILENAME="${DAY_NAME} ${MONTH_NAME} ${DAY_NUM} ${YEAR} Week ${WEEK_NUM}.md"
In theory this should mean DAILY_FILENAME would result in Thursday April 17 2025 Week 16.md. I figure the next step of the script would be to check if the file exists; if it does, do nothing. If not, then create it and add the template information.
# Construct File Path
FILE_PATH="/mnt/Obsidian/Infosphere/Daily Notes/${DAILY_FILENAME}"
# Create file if it doesn't exist
if [ ! -f "$FILE_PATH" ]; then
{
echo "---"
echo "title: Daily Notes ${DAY_NAME} ${MONTH_NAME} ${DAY_NUM} ${YEAR}"
echo "tags:"
echo " - notes"
echo " - Weeknotes"
echo "---"
echo ""
echo ""
echo "### Links"
echo "- asdf"
echo ""
} > "$FILE_PATH"
fi
I think this should work. I would 100% test it with a throwaway .md file first, before setting up a daily automation. But from there, I think I would run the append script at the same time. In that case, the script would look like this:
#!/bin/sh
# Get ISO week number
WEEK_NUM=$(date +%V)
# Get full date parts
DAY_NAME=$(date +%A)
MONTH_NAME=$(date +%B)
DAY_NUM=$(date +%e | sed 's/ //g')
YEAR=$(date +%Y)
# Build daily filename
DAILY_FILENAME="${DAY_NAME} ${MONTH_NAME} ${DAY_NUM} ${YEAR} Week ${WEEK_NUM}.md"
# Construct File Path
FILE_PATH="/mnt/Obsidian/Infosphere/Daily Notes/${DAILY_FILENAME}"
# Create file if it doesn't exist
if [ ! -f "$FILE_PATH" ]; then
{
echo "---"
echo "title: Daily Notes for ${DAY_NAME} ${MONTH_NAME} ${DAY_NUM}, ${YEAR}"
echo "tags:"
echo " - notes"
echo " - Weeknotes"
echo "---"
echo ""
echo ""
echo "### Links"
echo "- asdf"
echo ""
} > "$FILE_PATH"
doas /mnt/Scripts/append_daily_to_review.sh
fi
I think I'm going to give this a try this afternoon, once all my busywork is done. I probably won't update this post but I'll throw something in my Weeknotes either way.
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