ReaderMD View ReaderMD
Product menu

ReaderMD

Clipping Safari pages into Obsidian with YAML frontmatter

Last updated:

An Obsidian note is a Markdown file, and the useful ones start with a block of metadata. Get that block right at clip time and the note is searchable, sortable, and linked back to its source without you touching it again.

What frontmatter is

Frontmatter is structured metadata at the top of a Markdown file, fenced by two lines of three dashes. Obsidian reads it as the note’s properties. A clipped article usually wants five fields:

---
title: The article's headline
url: https://example.com/the-article
date: 2026-09-04
author: Who wrote it
description: One line saying what it is about
---

Filling that in by hand for every clip is the part people stop doing after a week. ReaderMD fills it in from the page.

Set the format once

Open the ReaderMD popover, then Settings. Under frontmatter you can pick:

  • YAML. The block above, which is what Obsidian, Logseq, and most Markdown tools expect.
  • Simple. The same fields without the YAML fence, for notes apps that choke on it.
  • None. Just the article.

Choose which of the five fields to include. The description field is filtered so it does not fill up with a site’s generic tagline: “YouTube” or “New York Times” standing in for a real summary gets skipped.

Set the filename once

The same settings panel has the filename format: a slug of the title, or the date followed by the slug. Date-first keeps a folder of clips in reading order; title-first keeps it alphabetical. Pick whichever matches how you already sort your vault.

Clip, then move it into the vault

On a Mac, Command-S in the popover saves the file to Downloads, and a Show in Finder button reveals it so you can drag it into your vault folder. Command-C copies the Markdown instead, for pasting into a note you already have open.

On iPhone and iPad the popover has Copy and Share, so the same Markdown goes to Obsidian, Files, or wherever the share sheet points. One purchase on the Mac App Store covers all three devices.

Not only Obsidian

Nothing here is Obsidian-specific. The same YAML block drops into Logseq, Bear, or a plain folder of .md files, and because it is Markdown with structure and no HTML noise, it is also the cleanest thing to paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor when you want a model to read the article.