Two years ago I got carried away and built a tool with a code name "notespub". It is the very same idea, albeit less polished. I documented my journey of extracting content out of Apple Notes, which naturally has been published with Notes as well [1].
I thought this was a cute idea; however, as I started using it more, I inevitably learned that there are features that are hard to mingle in Notes alone, i.e. custom themes, metadata, automatically generated home page, top/side navigation, cross-references, etc. These features could be implemented with an external system that helps you to manage a blog, yet that ruined the idea that I wanted a tool that puts local & privacy above everything else, a tool that has as little dependencies as possible.
Long story short, I started working on the second iteration that I thought wouldn't sacrifice privacy, but eventually shelved and haven't completed it. I guess it is time to open-source it.
Thanks for sharing, in fact I did read your post to dig into tech details, thank you for your work. Actually, Quotion sites can be customized in Apple Notes directly, check it out: https://docs.quotion.co/features/customize-layout . Other things like colors, fonts, they all can be achieved with similar format. Looking forward to your launch, :)
Neat trick. I found that I had to wrestle with Notes more than necessary, but if I were to pick up the project again, I would approach it differently this time:
- Notes function similarly to tweets, and, by definition, cannot by customized much. They are like cute little memos or a river of news where less is more.
- I thought it would also be cool, if within Notes I could subscribe to memos from my friends. Whoa, Apple Notes as a social network! As you are already familiar with Apple Notes structure, it won't be a surprise that it is not difficult to add content to special folders automatically (I built a prototype, which sadly never published.) However, this topic raises a bunch of important questions, and I don't remember whether I found all the answers. It's been a while.
I thought this was a cute idea; however, as I started using it more, I inevitably learned that there are features that are hard to mingle in Notes alone, i.e. custom themes, metadata, automatically generated home page, top/side navigation, cross-references, etc. These features could be implemented with an external system that helps you to manage a blog, yet that ruined the idea that I wanted a tool that puts local & privacy above everything else, a tool that has as little dependencies as possible.
Long story short, I started working on the second iteration that I thought wouldn't sacrifice privacy, but eventually shelved and haven't completed it. I guess it is time to open-source it.
[1] https://devlog.notespub.com/2022/08/site-generator-for-apple...