[feature idea] add month info to right corner "timeline"

[danieltomasz]

Would be nice to have month info there, it may be confusing when browsing archive notes

[liamcain]

Hi, what do you mean by "month info" exactly? Like just showing the month name somewhere?

[danieltomasz]

@liamcain yes, sorry for not being precise; When i investigated more, I found that the problem is somewhere else; I think the current solution is ok (like the info "4 months ago" for an old note)

What confused me is the behavior when I open a note with the date inside, which isn't a journal note, fore example

---
title: [Coaching Call, April 26, 2022 - YouTube]
tags: [Podcast]
date: 2022-04-26
launched: 
status: annotated
topics:  [ writing, PhD]
---

the month in the date in timeline here is wrong , this point to 1 January 2022 , last time it was some march week contating the 26th, the "behavior" isn't reproducible, after I restarted Obsidian the note doesn't have a "timeline" anymore

so this a bug, but not related to how the older note is displayed but to the fact that random timeline could appear in notes containing dates in yaml/name (not always) @liamcain I might rename the issue or close this one and start new one

[liamcain]

Oh, I see. The problem here is that periodic notes doesn't recognize the full date in the file name. It just sees the "2022" part and is classifying this note as "related to the year 2022." If the filename here contained 2022-04-22 or 20220422 instead, it would properly link to the correct date. This is a good point though about how false positives in the date parsing can cause confusion though.

I have some ideas for how I can improve the parser to better identify the full date, but the other part of the issue here is that it doesn't makes sense to show the timeline at all for yearly notes.

Thanks for the additional context! I would never have guessed that's what you meant from the original report 😅

[danieltomasz]

@liamcain sorry for not doing enough research on my side before posting!

I think it will be really hard to come up with an algorithm for parsing dates that will fit all users; one way may be to provide a way of parametrizing what it should look for with sane default details and the ability for users to customize it (but it may be too much work)

For years it may make sense to show previous/next years, Obsidian now is young, but there will be some cases in the future when users will want to check their plans/resolutions year by year or have yearly notes for their fiction writing (in that case the timelines should have the ability to be tweaked, like showing only existing notes or non-existing too by chronological order by every calendar/note set, but maybe this is too fine-grained)

if this info is useful, I don't have enabled yearly notes now;

Feel free to close this issue , now as is not specific enough

[liamcain]

No apologies necessary, I appreciate you bringing it to my attention. And please don't close the ticket, I think it touches on an important issue that I'll need to address.

I think it will be really hard to come up with an algorithm for parsing dates that will fit all users

Yeah, it's also about striking a balance between accuracy and speed. Parsing all different date formats can be expensive. One of the features I'm still in the planning stages of is looking at frontmatter for any dates there. So a rough idea could be adding a button to the timeline to quickly mark the parser as incorrect and have it automatically insert a corrected entry into a frontmatter key

---
related_date: 2022-04-22
---

It's maybe not the most elegant but it might be a convenient workaround.

For years it may make sense to show previous/next years

Yeah, I've already been planning on doing this (for weeks, months, quarters, and years. It just fell a little lower in the priority list.

if this info is useful, I don't have enabled yearly notes now;

Yeah, in that case it should probably just show the button but hide the timeline.

[danieltomasz]

It may be a good idea!

BTW If you want auto-parse date from yaml ( I dont know if you planned that) there may be a problem when users have two dates or more in yaml, it sometimes happens for projects, they may have start dates and due dates or other additional fields with dates, but you probably are aware about that