GoKawiilEveryone has a way of tracking what has left a mark on their life, whether it’s a book, a movie, a TV show, an anime, or a song. Sometimes it’s an online service with a massive catalog, but you’re always at the mercy of the platform deciding what stays and what goes. Other times, it’s a delightful, well-designed offline mobile app, but your varied interests rarely fit into a single predefined catalog or data model. Plus, those apps and services could vanish tomorrow.
After cycling through countless tools, I realized I wanted something I could truly control. I started building custom databases in Airtable, then moved to Notion, and eventually tried self-hosting NocoDB. In the end, instead of constantly migrating databases, I decided to embrace the philosophy of files over apps. I settled on an Obsidian Vault where everything I care about is a Markdown file, complete with front matter and organized using Dataview and later Obsidian Bases.
But manually managing a database of over 2,000 Markdown files introduced a new kind of friction: hunting down metadata, updating statuses, and tracking dates. The tedious labor of acting like a librarian replaced the actual joy of discovering what to enjoy next.
KizunaShelf is the answer to all of that.
Design philosophy
One principle I’ve always kept in mind is that KizunaShelf is not just another media tracker. Instead, it brings the dynamic flexibility of an Airtable-like database, letting users define exactly what their data means. The schema is yours to inspect and change, and serves as the source of truth for meaning.
A single KizunaShelf/config.yaml file saved in your vault folder declares your types, their fields, and the specific role of every field. It defines:
Which field represents the title of an item, and which language that title uses.
Which field describes a date and what that date represents (e.g., a game’s release date, when you started watching an anime, or when a specific event occurred).
Which field represents a status, along with its custom list of options.
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