Obsidian Templates

I need a place to keep my collection of templates for Obsidian documents and the Obsidian Web Clipper extension. These are some of them along with some notes on how I'm using Obsidian.

My Obsidian Conventions

How I use Obsidian continues to evolve. But what follows is probably close to what I'm doing today.

Agentic AI

I started by occasionally using Cursor to make sweeping edits or cleanups to my vault, by simply treating everything as simple Markdown. Which it is. I've recently been using Claude Code with the Obsidian Skills created by the Obsidian author. These skills take advantage of the obsidian CLI which allows the Claude app, not just Claude Code to make changes intelligently that allow Obsidian to maintain proper cross document linkages, etc.

This repo also ships Claude Code skills under .claude/skills/ for Google Calendar–driven meeting notes (they expect the Google Workspace MCP and tools configured in each skill):

• meeting-note-add — Create one meeting note from a calendar event (by date and/or title query).
• meeting-note-refresh — Patch an existing note when recordings, Gemini notes, or transcripts arrive later.
• meeting-notes-backfill — Create notes for every event in a range that does not yet have a file under Meetings/.
• meeting-notes-weekly-cleanup — Run backfill + refresh for the past week and emit a short report (intended for scheduling).

Obsidian Community Plugins

Some plugins I am barely using but haven't removed, because I think they may be a good idea eventually. The Stickyness column indicates how much I use them.

A couple plugins are required by the for Shimmering Obsidian workflow for Alfred. You are using Alfred right?!

Plugin	Description	Stickyness
Advanced URI	Extends Obsidian's URI scheme for automation and deep linking. For Alfred Workflow.	⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Calendar	Calendar view for navigating and creating daily notes.	⭐️⭐️️⭐️⭐️️️️️️️️
Dataview	Query and display vault data as tables, lists, and calendars using a SQL-like syntax. See Templates/Person.md. It's possible I could obviate this with the Bases core plugin. 🤷‍♀️	⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Git	Automatically commit and push vault changes to a Git repository.	⭐️⭐️
Marp	Markdown Presentation Engine frontmatter properties. See example in Templates/Presentation.md and the Themes	⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Meta Bind	Inline input fields and buttons bound to note frontmatter properties. See example in Templates/Meeting.md	⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Metadata Extractor	Exports vault metadata to JSON for use by external tools. For Alfred Workflow.	⭐️⭐⭐⭐⭐️
Omnisearch	Full-text search with fuzzy matching and PDF/image content indexing.	⭐️⭐⭐️⭐️⭐️️
Style Settings	UI for customizing theme CSS variables without editing code.	⭐️️
Tasks	Task management with due dates, recurrence, and queries across the vault.	⭐️️⭐️⭐️
Taskboard	Task management with Kanban board. I'm not really using it much yet.	⭐️️⭐️️
Templater	Powerful template engine with JavaScript scripting and auto-file placement.	⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Text Extractor	Extracts text from PDFs and images to make them searchable by Omnisearch.	⭐⭐⭐⭐️⭐️

Content Types

Documents in my vault have content types (contenttype property) which are particularly helpful for reference by bases. For example see the Topic Template (it embeds Topic Links.base).

The value is intially set by the Template or the Web Clipper Template and may be adjusted as the contents are refined.

Emoji	Content Type	Description
📖	Book	Notes and highlights from books being read.
🔖	Bookmark	Curated collections of external URLs organized by topic.
💬	Chat	Saved conversation logs or chat transcripts.
👤	Contact	People notes for colleagues and professional contacts.
🗂️	Index	Topic index pages that aggregate and link related notes.
📓	Journal	Daily and weekly journal entries.
👩🏻‍🏫	Lesson	Learning notes from courses, enablement sessions, and training.
✉️	Mail	Clipped emails of interest saved for reference.
📅	Meeting	Individual dated notes for a specific meeting instance.
🔁	MeetingSeries	Parent doc for a recurring meeting, accumulating themes and linking instances.
📝	Note	General-purpose reference and knowledge notes.
📽️	Presentation	Marp slide decks and exported talks.
📦	Repo	Clipped GitHub repository pages saved for reference.
🌐	Web	Web pages clipped from the browser for future reference.

Obsidian Vault Folder Structure

Do not get too obsessed about where to place notes. I find it helpful for certain content types to live in their own location, like People. When typing a link to a note that doesn't exist, you can influence where it goes if you include the folder in the name. I generally have a top level folder for each contenttype. Eg. Meetings, People, Presentations. Clippings use a subfolder.

For example, if I'm actively taking notes in a meeting (yes I do that) and a name comes up, I may type [[People/Dale Bewley]] so that later if I decide to click on that and flesh out the note it will already be in the right place.

This is one reason I often use the Templater style of templates. My Person template would automatically move the note for me when I applied it to the 'Fred Jones' note even if I hadn't already prefixed it with People.

Remember, it is really easy to move notes, and it is really easy to find them regardless of where they are. Don't let figuring out a folder structure block you from getting started with Obsidian.

• Web Clipper Clippings By Source

Clippings/
  ├── GitHub/
  ├── Mail/
  ├── YouTube/
  └── Web/

• Daily notes over time

Notes are moved to Archive after they have been processed into weekly or monthly notes.

Journal/
  ├── Archive/
  ├── Daily/
  ├── Weekly/
  └── Monthly/

• Meetings All meeting notes are in a folder. Individual meeting notes have a date prefix.

If those meetings are part of a series they include a series property pointing to a parent doc tracking the meetings from above. This can be helpful for tracking weekly office hours calls with product managers for example. The series note can contain current links to roadmap documents etc while the dated meeting notes retain a historical log.

It may make sense to move the dated meeting notes to a subdirectory at some point.

Meetings/
  ├── 2026-04-05 Fidget Spinner.md
  └── Fidget Spinner.md

• Career Stuff

ProDev/
  └─── Quarterly Connections/
    ├── 2025-Q3.md
    └── 2025-Q4.md

• Topics make a great overview page for a collection of notes on a topic. This is highly augmented by using the local Graph view to see connections. Here is a random sample of topics.

Topics/
  ├── Career.md
  ├── Meetings.md
  ├── Networking.md
  ├── OpenShift.md
  ├── People.md
  └── Virtualization.md

Other Template Sources I Benefited From

• https://github.com/obsidian-community/web-clipper-templates/tree/main
• https://github.com/Fred-Vatin/Web-Clipper-Templates
• https://dannb.org/blog/2022/obsidian-people-note-template/
• https://www.moritzjung.dev/obsidian-meta-bind-plugin-docs/

Repo Contents

Web Clipper Templates

These are based on the works of others. I have modified them to better suit my needs or just copied them here for convenience. See the list of sources below.

• default-clipper.json

  • Clipper for general web pages

• github-repository-clipper.json

  • Clipper for GitHub repositories

• google-mail-clipper.json

  • Clipper for Google Mail

Obsidian Document Templates

These are basic templates that may use dataviewjs to perform some inline queries.

• daily.md

  • Create a daily note

• Person.md

  • Collect details about a person and generate dynamic links to find emails, git repos, and company profiles

• Meeting.md

  • Create a meeting note. Tracks attendees, agenda, notes, and action items. Moves the file into the appropriate Meetings folder and links to series.

• MeetingSeries.md

  • Create a meeting series note. Used to collect recurring or related meetings. Tracks owners, cadence, and automatically gathers all meeting instances in the series.
  • Agenda ideas for the next meeting; knowledge gleaned from individual meetings may be summarized on the meeting series page.

• monthly.md

  • Create a monthly note with links to all days and weeks that month

• Note.md

  • General-purpose note with summary, key concepts, references, and connections (contenttype: Note).

• Presentation.md

  • Marp slide deck starter (marp: true frontmatter). Custom CSS lives under Templates/Marp/Themes/ (for example mylogo.css, palette-3.css, redhat.css); logo.png is referenced by some themes.

• Topic Template.md

  • Form an overview or "Index" of a topic. Notes that reference Topics: "[[Topics/Foo]]" making them easy to discover via the topic page.
  • Used as the basis for new topic files and for indexing connections between notes and topics. Embeds the Topic Links.base to surface all notes on a topic.

• Quarterly Connection.md

  • Create a quarterly connections note used for employee reviews.

• weekly.md

  • Create a weekly note with links to all days that week

Obsidian Bases

• Clippings.base

  • Table and card views over notes in Clippings/, ordered by content type and metadata (for example Topics, url, reviewed).

• Meetings by Series.base

  • Meeting notes grouped by series, with formula columns for recording and series links; includes filtered views such as meetings in the current month.

• Topic Links.base

  • Lists notes that link to a given topic, grouped by content type with custom icons (typically embedded from a topic or Topic Template).