Journal Bases Documentation
Navigate and manage your journal and periodic reviews with purpose-built Base views.
What is Journal Bases?
Journal Bases is an Obsidian plugin that provides two custom Base view types for journaling and periodic reviews. It supports daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly notes.
Why This Plugin?
Journaling and periodic reviews are powerful practices for personal growth, but they require discipline:
- Review daily notes once a week to extract key learnings and create a weekly note
- Review weekly notes once a month to create a monthly note
- Review monthly notes once a quarter to create a quarterly note
- Review quarterly notes once a year to create a yearly note
At year’s end, you have a single yearly note summarizing achievements, mistakes, and learnings.
The Two Views
| View | Purpose | Workflow |
|---|---|---|
| Periodic Notes | Daily journaling | Navigate, view, edit notes of a single period type |
| Periodic Review | Periodic reviews | Side-by-side comparison for extracting insights |
Quick Start
- Install via Settings > Community plugins > Browse > “Journal Bases”
- Configure period settings in Settings > Journal Bases
- Create or open a Base pointing to your journal folder
- Select Periodic Notes or Periodic Review from the view type dropdown
Features
- Inline editing with auto-save
- Create missing notes with one click
- Current period highlighting
- Template support via Templater
- Periodic Notes plugin sync
- Life Tracker integration
- Collapsible columns in review view
Requirements
- Obsidian v1.9.0+ (requires Bases feature)
- Optional: Periodic Notes for settings sync
- Optional: Templater for template support
Documentation
- Usage Guide - Detailed instructions for both views
- Configuration - Settings reference
- Tips & Best Practices - Get the most out of the plugin
- Release Notes - Version history
My other Obsidian plugins
| Plugin | What it does |
|---|---|
| Agentic Resource Discovery Server | Local-first Agentic Resource Discovery publisher and registry that serves your AI skills and tools to agents over a local HTTP and MCP server |
| Book Exporter | Export books (one manifest note + linked chapter notes) to EPUB and PDF via Pandoc |
| Bookshelf Base | Display your notes as a visual bookshelf via a custom Bases view |
| Dataview Serializer | Serialize Dataview queries to Markdown, and keep the Markdown representation up to date |
| Expander | Replace variables across your vault using HTML comment markers. Supports static values and dynamic functions |
| Ghost Publish | Publish your vault notes to a Ghost blog with configurable presets for tags, newsletters, and frontmatter conventions |
| Graph Explorer Base View | A custom Bases view that renders notes as an interactive force-directed graph with explored/unexplored tracking |
| Hidden Folders Access | Index hidden root-level folders (e.g. .claude) so they appear in the file tree, metadata cache, and Bases |
| Kanban Action Planner | Render your notes as configurable Kanban boards and calendars inside Bases, with statuses, ordering, relationships, and scheduling |
| Life Tracker | Capture and visualize the data that matters in your life |
| Note Village | A 2D pixel art village where your notes become villagers you can explore and chat with using AI |
| Obsidian Starter Kit | Adds strong typing support and powerful automation support for notes |
| Remarkable Synchronizer | Connect to the reMarkable cloud, list, download, and sync notebook pages as images |
| Replicate | Use AI models with ease via the Replicate.com integration |
| REST and MCP server | Exposes CLI commands as RESTful API endpoints and an MCP server for AI tool integration |
| Time Machine | Browse, compare, and restore previous versions of your notes using built-in file-recovery snapshots |
| Transcriber | Transcribe images to markdown using Ollama vision models |
| Typefully | Publish social media posts with ease using the Typefully integration |
| Update Time | Automatically update front matter to include creation and last update times |
Everything I build is documented in my newsletter and on my YouTube channel.
News & support
To stay up to date about this plugin, Obsidian in general, Personal Knowledge Management and note-taking:
- Subscribe to my newsletter
- Subscribe to my YouTube channel
- Join the Knowii community and learn to organize your notes and put your knowledge to work, together with fellow knowledge workers
If this plugin is useful to you, here are the best ways to support my work ❤️: