Hello #obsidianmd community! It's been a while since I've made a video. I figured I'd jump back in with a basic MacOS shortcut I use daily. This creates an Interstitial Journal entry, even when I'm not in @obsdmd . Thread version below 🧵👇
loom.com/share/e4f1d3ad65464bce95243bf27aeb0ed4
The first challenge I realized is that the daily note needs to exist first. If it doesn't, all I end up with is my journal entry on an otherwise blank daily note. So I need to check for the daily note file. Here is the entire shortcut screenshot for context.
Let's break this shortcut down into smaller chunks. The first thing I need to do is set up the date and time that @obsdmd expects for the Daily Note.
To do that, I run another helper shortcut I created to format the date and time. I could have placed this all in one shortcut, but I wanted to be able to reuse as much as I could in other shortcuts down the road. 👍
Let's take a look at the "Format Date - Obsidian" shortcut. Once this runs, the output is captured in "dateTimeParameters" as the output. IJ Entry will use this output to store the Date and Timestamp needed later.
Next, I need to check if the Daily Notes file actually exists. If it doesn't, the IJ Entry will just add itself to a new, blank daily note without any of my template text.
Let's take a look at the File Exist Daily shortcut.
Here's where I would have liked to store the entire path as a variable to make this shortcut check for ANY file (not just a file in my Daily Notes directory). If someone knows how to do this, let me know. 🙏
If the file does not exist, we need to create it with my final helper shortcut, "Create Daily Note".
Let's take a look at the "Create Daily Note" shortcut. Here is where it is important to capture the original shortcut name (IJ Entry) because it needs to run again to perform the file check after the Daily Note is created.
Back to IJ Entry. It will go through the file check again, but this time it should continue because the file is there. The rest of the shortcut asks for the journal entry text, constructs the journal entry, and appends it to the daily note.
Here's the entire workflow for my IJ Entry Shortcut.
The result after a few runs of the IJ Entry shortcut.
This same shortcut workflow can be adapted to create any entry, not just Daily Notes. Since I broke some of the shortcuts into their own helper shortcuts, I can just reuse those for other workflows. I hope this helps someone in the #obsidianmd community. I use it every day!