What do I want to collect?
todos
- Pull activities in from strava
- Based on the private notes on the strava activity
- Camps
- Photos
- Trigs
- 100 Climbs
- Based on the private notes on the strava activity
- Figure out how to organise images here
- Train journeys and stations
- For now, log train journeys simply, not with the specific bits of rail. Then you can start tracking stations
- Eventually link train journeys to bits of rail.
Trig points
Initial thoughts
So first I thought about only logging the first visit to a trig point. This would be simple, you have a note for each trig point, logging the date you visited it for example, and some other information about it (I will mention pictures later). However, what if I wanted to keep track of how many times I have visited a trig point, for example?
Ok so lonewalker.net has a database of his walks as well as a database of (standing) trig points. I don’t want to include all of the trig points in my obsidian, only the ones I have visited. But, this idea seems great.
Tracking walks as seperate entities also has the benefit of being able to log things like who I walked with, whether I was walking to or from camp, etc. I could link the walk to my person pages.
But if I’m going to track walks, I might as well track other activities. Such as rides. Then I can state whether the ride was an audax, commute, just for fun etc. One day I can keep track of which tiles I bagged in each ride, which ride I bagged the biggest number of tiles in etc.
I think tracking my hobbies like this in obsidian can once and for all quench my thirst for collections. It also has the added benefit in that I will own my own data. Currently I use strava to keep a record of all my activities. One day it might suddenly go bust, or they might put all the features behind a paywall. My collections are in plain markdown which is far more robust and will be able to be read by a computer 100 years from now. As well, because the obsidian vault is just a directory, I can store my gpx files here for each activity in the vault and link to them the markdown. I’m excited to implement this and see how else I can use obsidian as a kind of database.
I think I found a problem. gpx files aren’t showing up in the obsidian file explorer. Not sure how to remedy that. Also I need a way to link photos to each collection item. Do I link photos of trig points with the activity or with the trig? I guess both right? I wonder if you could use obsidian like a photo gallery?
Train journeys and stations
I wonder if it would also be possible to collect train journeys, flights, car journeys? I think I’m kind of obsessed with collecting things. I think. I definitely need to collect stations anyway, see which stations I visit the most etc. But that would require a similar thing as trig points and activities right? Tracking train stations would necessarily mean tracking train journeys too.
I think to make it simple it would be ideal to have it sync to my trainline account or something. Do they have an API? If I’m going to track which bits of railway I’ve been on too, which I would like to do, I would need kinda like a route planner where you can draw which bits of railway you’ve been on. The other option would be to use the database like realtime trains does, and then be able to review the route afterwards. That would be the sort of highest level of automation.
Again, I need to decide whether I want a first visited field and figure out how to deal with images with respect to collections