Move from Trello to Obsidian Kanban boards with this simple bookmarklet
I’ll try and make this short and sweet. I’m not trying to turn this into a recipe where you need to scroll through 20 screens of backstory just to figure out how much flour you need.
Nevermind, here’s 20 screens of backstory.
Why obsidian?
I’ve been an avid user of Obsidian (A second brain, for you, forever. As their tagline says.) for a couple years. There are few apps that have ever affected my productivity as much as obsidian has. I’m not going to go into detail about how it helps me to better organize and connect everything that I’ve ever written, or how it has created a better system for maintaining and helping me act on tasks and projects because there’s a lot of coverage on the internet for those sorts of things. In fact, here are a few:
- How to use Obsidian Notes: a step-by-step guide by Elizabeth Butler, MD, PhD
- Notion vs. Obsidian Notes by Jimmy on The Productive Engineer
- Obsidian vs. Roam vs. LogSeq by Mike Schmitz on The Sweet Setup
What’s a bookmarklet, you ask?
Remember the time before Chrome Extensions existed? If you just asked me what a bookmarklet is, then you clearly don’t. I get it, I might be old.
Before browser extensions, the best we had were bookmarklets — bookmarks that contained a bunch of JavaScript code that could run on any page. They didn’t need to be installed, they didn’t ask for crazy permissions, and they didn’t run all the time collecting data on every page you visited.
They still don’t. And I think they still have a place in the modern web.
I vented about this a little bit recently when I wrote a bookmarklet for copying YouTube links with specific timecodes in markdown so I could use them in Obsidian.
The following chart shows Google search trends for “Bookmarklet” over the last 5 years and their down-trend following the launch of Chrome Extensions.
Source: Google Trends United States 01 Jan 04–01 Apr 23
