Building a media inbox with Obsidian and Readwise

Prerequisites

To follow along with this tutorial, make sure you have a Readwise account set up with some highlights. You can use my referral link to get a free month of Readwise to start!

Additionally, make sure you have the Obsidian Official and Dataview plugins installed from the Obsidian community plugins, and make sure both are enabled.

Configuring the Readwise plugin and export

Go into the Obsidian settings, and go to the Readwise Official settings. First connect the plugin to your Readwise account, then you will see the following:

Then set the base folder that you will sync your export to, then click the customize button to be taken to the web interface for the Readwise export:

I have the following settings on this page:

Group Files In Category Folders

On, default settings

Use Custom File Name

On

File Name

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{{ "📚" if category == "books"}}{{"📰" if category == "articles"}}{{"🐦" if category == "tweets"}}{{"🎙" if category == "podcasts"}} {{ title }}

Page Title

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# {{ "📚" if category == "books"}}{{"📰" if category == "articles"}}{{"🐦" if category == "tweets"}}{{"🎙" if category == "podcasts"}} {{ title }}

Page Metadata

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{% if image_url -%}
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![rw-book-cover]({{image_url}})
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{% endif -%}
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## Metadata
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- Author:: {% if author %}[[@ {{author}}]]{% endif %}
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- Full Title:: {{full_title}}
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- Category:: {{ "📚" if category == "books"}}{{"📰" if category == "articles"}}{{"🐦" if category == "tweets"}}{{"🎙" if category == "podcasts"}}
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{% if url -%}
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- URL:: {{url}}
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{% endif -%}
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- Synced:: [[{{last_highlighted_date|date('Y-m-d')}}]]

Highlights Header

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{% if is_new_page %}
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## Highlights
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{% elif has_new_highlights -%}
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## New highlights added [[{{date|date('Y-m-d')}}]]
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Synced:: [[{{date|date('Y-m-d')}}]]
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#status/integrate
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{% endif -%}

Highlight

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- {{ highlight_text }}{% if highlight_location and highlight_location_url %} ([{{highlight_location}}]({{highlight_location_url}})){% elif highlight_location %} ({{highlight_location}}){% endif %}{% if highlight_note %}
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    - Note: {{ highlight_note }}{% endif %}

YAML Front Matter

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tags: media/captures/{{category}} status/integrate
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imported-to-readwise: {{date|date('Y-m-d')}}

The important pieces for our inbox:

• The #status/integrate tag in YAML Frontmatter and Highlights Header

You can choose whatever tag you want here, but this is a status tag we will be using on initial sync and new highlights added to indicate that we have not processed this note yet.

• Synced:: property in Page Metadata and Highlights Header

This adds the date as a link in YYYY-MM-DD.

(Note that this will link your Readwise export notes to the daily notes in your graph. It is significantly more difficult to accomplish the Dataview query without these links.)

Additional notes on configuration

All properties in the Page Metadata are given the double colon (::) to make them properties that Dataview will recognize.

Additionally, I have chosen to add the Author as a link using the [[@ Author]] convention I use in my vault. Feel free to change this if you do something different, it will not affect the end product.

Building the Inbox with Dataview

After the dataview export is configured, go back to the Readwise Official settings in Obsidian and click Initiate Sync. After the export is done, place the following dataviewjs query in a note:

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```dataviewjs
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const mediaType = ""
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const numToShow = 5
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const mediaFolder = '"030 Media/Readwise"'
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const statusTag = '#status/integrate'
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const conditions = [mediaFolder, statusTag]
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const filterCondition = conditions.join(' and ')
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dv.table(["File Name", "Author", "Last Synced"],
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    dv.pages(filterCondition)
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    .sort(p => [].concat(p.synced).reduce((a,b) => {return a > b ? a : b;}), 'desc')
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    .slice(0, numToShow)
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    .map(p => [
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            p.file.link,
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            p.author,
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            [].concat(p.synced).reduce((a,b) => {return a > b ? a : b;})
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        ]
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    )
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)
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```

There are 4 properties to set here:

• mediaType will filter on the Category:: property in your export. Leave it blank for all Readwise media, or set it to 📰 to get only articles, for instance
• numToShow is the number of results that will display in your inbox table.
• mediaFolder is the base folder for your Readwise export, and should be the same as what you set in the plugin settings. Note that it MUST be surrounded with double quotes ("")
• statusTag is the name of the tag you want to filter on. I have it set to grab #status/integrate as our unprocessed status tag, but you can leave it blank for no tag filtering.

If all goes well you should have a table now that looks something like this:

Nice! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or in the Obsidian Discord (jmill#1001)