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I looked for many alternatives to taking notes and Joplin ended up being what I went with, it's fantastic. I wrote a small script to export my notes to a static website because I figured someone could use the knowledge, even if it's just a brain dump:

https://notes.stavros.io/

I also had an idea to make a site where you could take notes and have them be auto-published (like the above, but as a service), to create a community of random knowledge dumps. Think of a Wikipedia, but made of personal sites and not as rigorous, with a very "personal Web 1.0 website" feel, but talking to a few friends it didn't seem like they saw much point in it.



That is really awesome, this kind of functionality would be a really awesome plugin to Joplin itself somehow.

> I also had an idea to make a site where you could take notes and have them be auto-published (like the above, but as a service), to create a community of random knowledge dumps. Think of a Wikipedia, but made of personal sites and not as rigorous, with a very "personal Web 1.0 website" feel, but talking to a few friends it didn't seem like they saw much point in it.

Alongside this idea, would you use a browser plugin that shares your bookmarks as a stream? Almost like a cross of the github "X starred Y" stream and Twitter (with none of the social-y features). I favorite a lot of things from day to day and would love to know what others are favoriting/finding as well.

Also, somewhat unrelated to that, would you pay for encrypted offsite joplin sync target/backups?

I'd love to make it possible to also share-from-joplin for single notes but that feature isn't there yet. The only way to make it happen otherwise would be synchronizing somewhere unencrypted (!) and then asking that somewhere to "publish" your notes. Unfortunately, since joplin doesn't have multiple "profiles" or any way to separate encryption keys or which notes are and aren't encrypted... it's hard to do that as well..


> this kind of functionality would be a really awesome plugin to Joplin itself somehow.

Agreed, I looked for a plugin but unfortunately found none.

> Alongside this idea, would you use a browser plugin that shares your bookmarks as a stream?

I don't really use bookmarks, whenever I come across an interesting page I put it in https://historio.us, but they're too few to make a stream out of...

> Also, somewhat unrelated to that, would you pay for encrypted offsite joplin sync target/backups?

I don't think so, I prefer doing my own hosting and NextCloud/WebDAV works quite well, so I wouldn't want yet another account to manage.

> Unfortunately, since joplin doesn't have multiple "profiles"

Yeah, I ran into this problem with my script as well, where I wanted some notes to be private. For those, I just created a notebook that has "private" in the name and put them all there, the script skips them. Tags might work as well.


> I don't really use bookmarks, whenever I come across an interesting page I put it in https://historio.us, but they're too few to make a stream out of...

Interesting! I'd never heard of historious, thanks for the link. I'm quite surprised that using that is easier than hitting Ctrl+D (in Firefox anyway), and doing the management there. I totally get it though.

> I don't think so, I prefer doing my own hosting and NextCloud/WebDAV works quite well, so I wouldn't want yet another account to manage.

Yep, I can see that, many who find their way to joplin are quite technologically independent and came to joplin precisely because of those reasons. I guess not many people would really want hosted WebDav when you can just hook up NextCloud/S3/OneDrive/etc.

> Yeah, I ran into this problem with my script as well, where I wanted some notes to be private. For those, I just created a notebook that has "private" in the name and put them all there, the script skips them. Tags might work as well.

Yeah -- tags would definitely be the way, but the problem is that I'd want someone to be able to publish an update from their phone (or at least from every platform possible), and be able to keep their encryption. Just spitballing, but imagine serving a sync/backup service that happens to also be able to spit out md-derived websites very very easily. Notion and it's ilk have features like that and people seem very excited about it. A notebook as a blogging platform also seems interesting/incredibly low friction. Could even be a podcasting platform if you attached audio to notes.


> I'm quite surprised that using that is easier than hitting Ctrl+D (in Firefox anyway), and doing the management there.

It's easier because I just hit a different shortcut and don't need to do any management at all afterwards, I can just search the content.

> I guess not many people would really want hosted WebDav when you can just hook up NextCloud/S3/OneDrive/etc.

Many people probably would, just not me :P

> A notebook as a blogging platform also seems interesting/incredibly low friction.

Yep, hence my idea of "notes as a site" in my first comment.


> It's easier because I just hit a different shortcut and don't need to do any management at all afterwards, I can just search the content.

Reasonable, I clicked around their demo and I think I can see the value there.

> Yep, hence my idea of "notes as a site" in my first comment.

yeah this sounded like it'd fit great with the other hosted webdav thing, thanks for talking through it a bit!


Oh I made historious myself, so it's a pretty good fit for me :P


I do something similar with Drift [0], a customized distribution of TiddlyWiki [1]. I capture as many thoughts and ideas as I can using the Zettlekasten methodology [2]. If it can be distilled to a single piece of knowledge, I assess, should this be private for me? or it can be useful to anyone else? if b, then I publish add it as a Tiddler on my public TiddlyWiki file, and I run an update that will upload it to my web site [3]. If private, I keep it in my private file.

TiddlyWiki has been around for a very long time, and it keeps evolving. My personal file has over 3,000 Tiddlers and it keeps growing. It's unbelievable all you can do in a single file with just HTML and JavaScript. As long as those standards exist in 20-30 years, I can be sure my files, all tags and all relationships are still available and highly usable.

[0] https://akhater.github.io/drift/

[1] https://tiddlywiki.com/

[2] https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/

[3] https://ramirosalas.com


That's very nice! TiddlyWiki was the first thing I looked at, but couldn't find a good way to publish it on the web. Thanks for the Drift link!


I would love a network of people’s knowledge base / personal notes. I have several people’s kb-sites bookmarked, which I check in from time to time - I always learn a ton! I have been using Obsidian to take notes of everything I learn - my own KB - and have been thinking of how the share the notes out publicly, while still keeping the informal, private, low-friction note taking. For those who share their notes/kb publicly, whats your strategy?


> and have been thinking of how the share the notes out publicly, while still keeping the informal, private, low-friction note taking.

That's exactly what I want to do too. Increasing the friction makes people less likely to share, so I want the community to feel very casual, so people aren't afraid to post even single-sentence brain dumps.

> For those who share their notes/kb publicly, whats your strategy?

You mean those who have already shared them? The advantage of a centralized site would be improved searchability, so you'd help more people.

Since I don't really aim to make money from this, it'd be open source, sort of like a Neocities vibe.

Would you like to email me at hi@stavros.io if you're interested (and whoever else reads this comment, please feel free). If I do end up making this I'll make it invite-only so I don't have to worry about spam (at least at first), and this would be a nice way to have a few early testers.


I keep two TiddlyWiki [0] files, one public, one private.

If I feel that a certain note can become its own piece of knowledge in a Zettlekasten fashion and can have any value for someone else, I put it in my public file and I run a script that will copy it to my hosting provider. My public site is a single file! [1].

[0] https://tiddlywiki.com/

[1] https://ramirosalas.com/


Me too, I find Tiddlywiki perfect for this kind of use! You may have seen it, but it is recently made a php script that let you save directly to your server and create a public version where private tiddlers are removed or censored [0]. That way you only need to manage a single file. But it sounds as you have found a good way of doing it already:)

[0] https://groups.google.com/g/tiddlywiki/c/GRkskZRzj_o


Ditto, with https://github.com/jareware/howto/, which I’ve been meaning to automatically sync from a specific notebook from my Joplin. Yours looks very polished though, maybe I should just use that!


You could, the script is a bit tailored to me right now but very slightly. It just exports a Zola site and I used the Gitbook theme, but you should be able to easily swap in any theme you want.




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