Speeding up my Learning Log process

Dave’s blog post “How to make a Link Aggregator in Obsidian” inspired me to finally make my Learning Log process a little smarter, starting with the May 2025 log.

What I had been doing

1. Automatically syncing my Reader by Readwise highlights into Obsidian
2. Going through the new articles manually and adding them to my blog post Markdown (also written in Obsidian)

Obsidian enables you to customize to the nth degree, so I figured there was a better way to do this but hadn’t made it a priority. Dave’s post showed me I could do this pretty quickly!

Enter Dataview plugin

I’d already installed the Dataview plugin for Obsidian for one reason or another and ended up writing a DQL query very similar to Dave’s:

LIST map(rows, (r) => elink(regexreplace(r.file.frontmatter.url, "\\?utm_.*", ""), r.title))
FROM "Resources/Readwise/Articles"
WHERE file.frontmatter.highlightedDate >= "2025-08-01"
	AND file.frontmatter.highlightedDate < "2025-09-01"
	AND file.frontmatter.url
FLATTEN file.tags AS tag
GROUP BY tag
SORT file.frontmatter.highlightedDate DESC

What this query does is:

• Pull all the articles I highlighted in a given month from the directory where I’ve synced my Readwise articles. It filters out any articles that don’t have a URL in the frontmatter, i.e. email newsletters.
• Group the linked article titles by the tag I applied in Reader.

I copy and paste this query into my blog post draft, update the tag groupings to be headers, and hand-curate the list a little further. I could use Dataview JS to structure this in a fancier way and skip some of this manual bit, but I find it’s worth slowing down at this curation stage.

You’ll notice I do have dates hardcoded in here as well. As we all know, the hardest problems in computer science are:

• People problems
• Naming things
• Wrangling dates

I kept getting weird errors and issues with data handling, so decided to just throw up my hands and enter the dates manually. I only have to update them once a month, and so this XKCD comic seemed apt.

In any case, this was a nice little quality of life update for my blogging process, and I’m now playing with all things Dataview in my Obsidian notes!