A few months back I wrote about my search for a good way to store and organize my collection of bookmarks, and how I eventually settled on using Obsidian as the place I keep everything. This is still the case, and while the system could use some polishing I’m still happy with it.
There was one issue with using Obsidian as my app for bookmarking that introduced a bit of friction though, and that was when I wanted to save something from my phone. I spend a significant amount of my web browsing time on my iPhone, and while Obsidian is one of my favorite apps of all time, using it on the phone is far from the ideal experience.
I’ve been dealing with saving links by entering all the information manually (using Quick Add to not make it completely awful) for some time now, but it was always in the back of my mind that there must be some better way to do this. Then I remembered the Actions for Obsidian app, which adds tons of Shortcuts actions! And so with that purchased and installed, I set out to try and make a Shortcut to make saving bookmarks on my phone a whole lot more frictionless. This is what I came up with:
This is most definitely a V1 of this particular Shortcut, but for the time being it does what I need it to do, and it’s so, so much faster than what I was doing before. Very simply it grabs the link and title of the page I’m looking at in Safari, and saves it to a .md file in the appropriate location so it will show up in my Obsidian vault.