How to Take Notes While Reading on The Web With Obsidian

Taking notes while reading on the web becomes far more useful when highlights don’t stay trapped in a browser tab. The core workflow here pairs a web-capture extension—Eloquent Capture and Highlight—with Obsidian, then turns raw highlights into a compact, layered summary using progressive summarization. The payoff is simple: long articles can be distilled into a few sentences later, while the original context remains one click away.

The process starts with installing the Chrome extension called Eloquent Capture and Highlight (eloquent.works). After adding it to the browser, users log in via an email link and pin the extension for quick access. On any webpage—such as a Medium article—clicking the extension opens a floating pop-up window. From there, users can either type their own thoughts directly or highlight text on the page. A key detail is that the highlighted snippets are preserved inside the Eloquent interface even after closing the browser window, while the on-page highlight markings themselves may disappear.

Once enough material has been captured (the workflow doesn’t require doing this after every single article), the saved highlights are copied from the Eloquent pop-up and pasted into Obsidian. In Obsidian, a dedicated folder—“eloquent highlights”—collects these imported notes, creating a clear pipeline from web reading to a personal knowledge base.

The second half of the method is where the notes become more than a scrapbook: progressive summarization, attributed to Thiago Forte from Building a Second Brain. The approach uses multiple passes of highlighting to compress information step by step. First, the important parts of the original article are highlighted. Next, the “highlights of the highlights” are highlighted again—visually marked with italicized text in the example. Then, a further pass highlights the “highlights of the highlights,” producing additional layers. Over time, this creates a fine-grained distillation: an article that might take 10–20 minutes to read can shrink down to only a few sentences.

The example also shows how this layering supports retrieval and understanding. When reviewing a note later, the layered structure makes it easy to remember what the idea was about. If context is missing, the system allows users to trace back to the source material rather than relying on memory alone.

Finally, the workflow includes a motivation tied to learning credibility: the distilled notes can be shared publicly, and sharing is framed as a way to build credibility—without which the knowledge may not carry much weight. Overall, the method is designed to be replicable beyond Obsidian, but Obsidian is preferred for organizing and refining the captured web insights into layered summaries that remain searchable and contextual.