Notion, Obsidian and … Gizmo?

Another Notes App, Seriously?

I recently wrote about my efforts to cheaply re-publish my Medium stories on my own website. Why? Because when I publish on Medium a part of the process isn’t mine. Medium decides who sees my stories (usually, no one) and if Medium goes away, my stories also go away. I like having my own little grain of sand in the vast ocean of websites to call my own. I can publish whatever I want there, including any apps I happen to write. After all these years of working to help other people get rich, I like having a body of work I can point to and call my own.

My initial process was to write my stories in markdown, and then use a utility I wrote to convert those into my website blog, which I then copy to AWS. It works fine, but it’s also something of a pain. Markdown isn’t the most pleasant tool to use for writing. Ironically, I like Medium’s simple rich text editor best.

The Obvious Solution

Given I’ve already written a nice little web-based note taking tool, the obvious solution was to incorporate my markdown tools right into the notes app. So I did. 

The world surely doesn’t need another note taking tool, as there are already plenty of great ones out there. I do like mine though, and I think you might too. Here’s what makes it nice:

  • Nothing to install, it runs in your browser. Give it a try.
  • Includes a chrome plugin to summarize web pages. Right click on any web page and you get a little popup menu option that, when clicked, will capture the contents of the page and summarize it, create a note for it, and capture basic information about the page like its url. So it’s also a handy bookmarking tool.

Chrome Plugin for Summarizing Web Pages

  • Automatically saves all your notes to your local disk as markdown. So you can use your notes with other tools like Obsidian too.
  • Backup your notes either as Json or Markdown, and import into other browsers
  • Export your notes as a web page. There is also support for some customization, like background colors and so on. Check out my blog here to have a look at published notes.